write a critical summary of essay common sense written by hazlitt

• William Hazlitt: Selected Essays Summary

by William Hazlitt

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Written by Yun Gi, Raju Yatham, Vasagiri Vedavathi, Fathima Binth hamza

On The Fear Of Death

Here, in this essay, Hazlitt talks about the uncertainty of life and fear of death. In this mortal world, everything is going to be an end for sure. Hazlitt says that if someone lives his life with the fear of death, then he cannot enjoy his life.

The writer thought that our ancestors were braver than the modern people in the nineteenth century. They fought wars and lived their life without any fear of loss or death. Modern society makes people more fearful.

Hazlitt suggests the only way to get out of the fear of death is should always remember that everything is mortal in the world. We should not have fear of anything; instead, we should live and enjoy every moment.

On The Conduct Of Life

William Hazlitt wrote many essays On the conduct of life among them. The essay was published in Literary Remains of the Late William Hazlitt: With Notice of His Life in 1836. In the essay, Hazlitt describes a father's consent for his son.

At the start of the essay, a father writes a letter and tells his son that he is about to enter a new world. His son is about to be admitted to the school. He tells his son that he might not be able to support his son due to his health issues. The boy's father was worried about his child because the school's atmosphere was new for his son. The father advises his son on how he should behave in school and the world. His father tells him that his conduct is very important for his character.

On Nicknames

In the essay, William Hazlitt writes about the importance of nicknames. He writes that, in our history, nicknames play a very significant role. The subject of the essay may seem funny to the readers, but Hazlitt skillfully explains its presence in history.

William Hazlitt: Selected Essays Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for William Hazlitt: Selected Essays is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What is your opinion of Hazelitt's son from a reading his fathers letter

I think his son, like any young man. seems impressionable and innocent to world. At the start of the essay, a father writes a letter and tells his son that he is about to enter a new world. His son is about to take admission in school. He tells...

What was the book enjoyed by Hazlitt's father?

I'm sorry, what sour are you using for the answer to this question? The book itself, or a reference book?

Hazlitt's "Letter" was written in the hope that the his son "would not grow to form immediate prejudices of others but would rather mature into a well-rounded gentleman". Discuss.

Which specific letter are you referring to?

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• How Hazlitt in "On Gusto" and Steele in The Spectator No. 84 Appeal to the Reader's Emotions

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William Hazlitt

On genius and common sense.

We hear it maintained by people of more gravity than understanding, that genius and taste are strictly reducible to rules, and that there is a rule for everything. So far is it from being true that the finest breath of fancy is a definable thing, that the plainest common sense is only what Mr. Locke would have called a mixed mode —, subject to a particular sort of acquired and an definable tact. It is asked, “If you do not know the rule by which a thing is done, how can you be sure of doing it a second time?” And the answer is, “If you do not know the muscles by the help of which you walk, how is to you do not fall down at every step you take?” In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason; that is, from the impression of a number of things on the mind, which impression is true and well founded, though you may not be able to analyze or account for it in the several particulars. In a gesture you use, in a look you see, in a tone you hear, you judge of the expression, propriety, and meaning from habit, not from reason or rules; that is to say, from innumerable instances of like gestures, looks, and tones, in innumerable other circumstances, variously modified, which are too many and too refined to be all distinctly recollected, but which do not therefore operate the less powerfully upon the mind and eye of taste.

Shall we say that these impressions (the immediate stamp of nature) do not operate in a given manner till they are classified and reduced to rules, or is not the rule itself grounded, upon the truth and certainty of that natural operation? How then can the distinction of the understanding as to the manner on which they operated be necessary to their producing their due and uniform effect upon the mind? If certain effects did not regularly arise out of certain causes in mind as well as matter, there could be no rule given for them: nature does not follow the rule, but suggests it.

Reason is the interpreter and critic of nature and genius, not their law-giver and judge. He must be a poor creature indeed whose practical convictions do not in almost all cases outrun his deliberate understanding, or does not feel and know much more than he can give reason for. Hence the distinction between eloquence and wisdom, between ingenuity and common sense. A man may be dexterous and able in explaining the grounds of his opinions, and yet may be a mere sophist, because be only sees one half of a subject. Another may feel the whole weight of a question, nothing relating to it may be lost upon him, and yet he may be able to give no account of the manner in which it affects him, or to drag his reasons from their silent lurking places. The last will be a wise man, though neither a logician nor rhetorician. Goldsmith was a fool to Dr. Johnson in argument; that is in assigning the specific grounds of his opinions: Dr. Johnson was a fool to Goldsmith in the fine tact, the airy, intuitive faculty with which he skimmed the surfaces of things, and unconsciously formed his opinions. Common sense is the just result of the sum total of such unconscious impressions in the ordinary occurrences of life, as they are treasured up in the memory, and called out by the occasion. Genius and taste depend much upon the same principal exercised on loftier ground and in more unusual combinations.

I am glad to shelter myself from the charge of affectation or singularity in this view of an often debated but ill-understood point, by quoting a passage from Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, which is full, and, I think, conclusive to the purpose. He says:

I observe, as a fundamental ground common to all the Arts with which we have any concern in this Discourse, that they address themselves only on two faculties of the mind, its imagination and its sensibility.

All theories which attempt to direct or to control the Art, upon any principles falsely called rational, which we reason to be the end or means of Art, independent on the known first effect produced by objects on the imagination, must be false and delusive. For though it may appear bold to say it, the imagination be affected, the conclusion is fairly drawn; if it not be affected, the reasoning is erroneous, because the end is not obtained; the effect itself being the test, and the only test, of the truth and efficacy of the means.

“There is in the commerce of life, as in Art, a sagacity which is far from being contradictory to the right reason, and is superior to any occasional exercise of that faculty which supersedes it, and does not wait for the slow progress of deduction, but goes at once, by what appears a kind of intuition, to the conclusion. A man endowed with this faculty feels and acknowledges the truth, though it is not always in his power, perhaps, to give a reason for it; because he cannot recollect and bring before him all the materials that gave birth to his opinion; for very many and very intricate considerations may unite to the principle, even of small and minute parts, involved in, or dependent on, a great system of things: though these in process of time are forgotten, the right impression still remains fixed in his mind.

“This impression is the result of the accumulated experience of our whole life, and has been collected, we do not always know how, or when. But this mass of collective observation, however acquired, ought to prevail over that reason, which however powerfully exerted on any particular occasion, will probably comprehend but a partial view of the subject; and our conduct in life, as well as in the arts, is or ought to be generally governed by this habitual reason: it is our happiness that we are enabled to draw on such funds. If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.

“It appears to me therefore” (continues Sir Joshua) “that our first thoughts, that is, the effect which any thing produces on our minds, on its first appearance, is never to be forgotten; and it demands for that reason, because it is the first, to be laid up with care. If this be not done, the artist may happen to impose on himself by partial reasoning; by a cold consideration of those animated thoughts which proceed, not perhaps from caprice or rashness (as he may afterwards conceit), but from the fulness of his mind, enriched with the copious stores of all the various inventions which he had ever seen, or had ever passed in his mind. Those ideas are infused into his design, without any conscious effort; but if he be not on his guard, he may reconsider and correct them, till the whole matter is reduced to a commonplace invention.

“This is sometimes the effect of what I mean to caution you against; that is to say, an unfounded distrust of the imagination and feeling, in favour of narrow, partial, confined, argumentative theories, and of principles that seen to apply to the design in hand; without considering those general impressions on the fancy in which real principles of sound reason , and of much more weight and importance, are involved, and, as it were, lie hid under the appearance of a sort of vulgar sentiment. Reason, without doubt, must ultimately determine everything; at this minute it is required to inform as when that very reason is to give way to feeling.”

Mr. Burke, by whom the foregoing train of thinking was probably suggested , has insisted on the same thing, and made rather a perverse use of it in several parts of his Reflections on the French Revolution ; and Windham in one of his Speeches has clenched it into an aphorism “There is nothing so true as habit.” Once more I would say, common sense is tacit reason. Conscience is the same tacit sense of right and wrong, or the impression of our moral experience and moral apprehensions on the mind, which, because it works unseen, yet certainly, we sometimes attribute the violent operations of our passions, of which we can neither trace the source nor assign the reason, to the instigation of the Devil! I shall here try to go more at large into this subject, and to give such instances and illustrations of it as occur to me.

One of the persons who had rendered themselves obnoxious to Government and been included in a charge for high treason in the year 1794, had retired soon after into Wales to write an epic poem and enjoy the luxuries of rural life. In his peregrinations through that beautiful scenery, he had arrived one fine morning at the inn at Llangollen, in the romantic valley of that name He in all the dalliance of expectation when a face passed, of which he took no notice at the instant - but when his breakfast was brought in presently after, he found his appetite for it gone - the day had lost its freshness in his eye - he was uneasy and spiritless; and without any cause that he could discover, a total change had taken place in his feelings. While he was trying to account for this odd circumstance, the same face passed again - it was the face of Taylor the spy; and he was no longer at a loss to explain the difficulty. He had before caught only a transient glimpse, a passing sideview of the face; but though this was not sufficient to awaken a distinct idea in his memory, his feelings, quicker and surer, had taken the alarm; a string had been touched that gave a jar to his whole frame, and would not let him rest, though he could not at all tell what was the matter with him. To the flitting, shadowy, half distinguished profile that had glided by his window was linked unconsciously and mysteriously, but inseparably, the impression of the trains that had been laid for him by this person; - in this brief moment, in this dim illegible short-hand of the mind he had just escaped the speeches of the Attorney and Solicitor General over again; the gaunt figure of Mr. Pitt glared at him; the walls of a prison enclosed him; and he felt the hands of the executioner near him, without knowing it till the tremor and disorder of his nerves gave information to his reasoning faculties that all was not well within. That is, the same state of mind was recalled by one circumstance in the series of association that had been produced by the whole set of circumstances at the time, though the manner in which this was done was not immediately perceptible. In other words, the feeling of pleasure or pain, of good or evil, is revived, and acts instantaneously upon the mind, before we have time to recollect the precise objects which have originally given birth to it.

The incident here mentioned was merely, then, one case of what the learned understand by the association of ideas: but all that is meant by feeling or common sense is nothing but the different cases of the association of ideas, more of less true to the impression of the original circumstances, as the reason begins with the more formal development of those circumstances, or pretends to account for the different cases of the association of ideas. But it does not follow that the dumb and silent pleading of the former (though sometimes, nay often, mistaken) is less true than that of its babbling interpreter, or that we are never to trust its dictates without consulting the express authority of reason. Both are imperfect, both are useful in their way, and therefore both are best together, to correct or to confirm one another. It does not appear that in the singular instance above mentioned, the sudden impression on the mind was superstition or fancy, though it might have been thought so, had it not been proved by the event to have a real physical and moral cause. Had not the same face returned again, the doubt would never been properly cleared up, but would have remained a puzzle ever after, or perhaps have been soon forgot.— By the law of association as laid down by physiologists, any impression in a series can recall any other impression in that series without going through the whole in order: so that the mind drops the intermediate links, and passes on rapidly and by stealth to the more striking effects of pleasure or pain which have naturally taken the strongest hold of it.

By doing this habitually and skilfully with respect to the various impressions and circumstances with which our experience makes us acquainted, it forms a series of unpremeditated conclusions on almost all subjects that can be brought before it, as just as they are of ready application to human life; and common sense is the name of this body of unassuming but practical wisdom. Common sense, however, is an impartial, instinctive result of truth and nature, and will therefore bear the test and abide the scrutiny of the most severe and patient reasoning. It is indeed incomplete without it. But ingrafting reason on feeling, we “make assurance double sure.”

’Tis the last key-stone that makes up the arch… Then stands it a triumphal mark! Then men Observe the strength, the height, the why and when It was erected; and still walking under, Meet some new matter to look up, and wonder.

But reason, not employed to interpret nature, and to improve and perfect common sense and experience, is, for the most part, a building without a foundation. The criticism exercised by reason, then, on common sense may be as severe as it pleases, but it must be as patient as it is severe. Hasty, dogmatical, self-satisfied reason is worse than idle fancy, or bigoted prejudice. It is systematic, ostentatious in error, closes up the avenues of knowledge, and “shuts the gates of wisdom on mankind.” It is not enough to show that there is no reason for a thing, that we do not see the reason of it: if the common feeling, if the involuntary prejudice sets in strong favour of it, if, in spite of all we can do, there is a lurking suspicion on the side of our first impressions, we must try again, and believe that truth is mightier than we. So in offering a definition of any subject, if we feel a misgiving that there is any fact or circumstance emitted, but which we have only a vague apprehension, like a name we cannot recollect, we ask for more time, and not cut the matter short by an arrogant assumption of the point in dispute. Common sense thus acts as a check-weight on sophistry, and suspends our rash and superficial judgements.

On the other hand, if not only no reason can be given for a thing, but every reason is clear against it, and we can account from ignorance, from authority, from interest, from different causes, for the prevalence of an opinion or sentiment, then we have a right to conclude that we have mistaken a prejudice for an instinct, or have confounded a false and partial impression with the fair and unavoidable inference from general observation. Mr. Burke said that we ought not to reject every prejudice, but should separate the husk of prejudice from the truth it encloses, and so try to get at the kernel within; and thus far he was right. But he was wrong in insisting that we are to cherish our prejudices, “because they are prejudices”: for if all are well founded, there is no occasion to inquire into their origin or use; and he who sets out to philosophize upon them, or make the separation Mr. Burke talks of in this spirit and with this previous determination, will be very likely to mistake a maggot of a rotten canker for the precious kernel of truth, as was indeed the case with our political sophist.

There is nothing more distinct than common sense and vulgar opinion. Common sense is only a judge of things that fall under common observation, or immediately come home to the business and bosoms of men. This is of the very essence of its principle, the basis of its pretensions. It rests upon the simple process of feeling, - it anchors in experience. It is not, nor cannot be, the test of abstract, speculative opinions. But half the opinions and prejudices of mankind, those which they hold in the most unqualified approbation and which have been instilled into them under the strongest sanctions, are of this latter kind, that is, opinions, not which they have ever thought, known or felt one tittle about, but which have been palmed on their understandings by fraud of force, and which they continue to hold at the peril of life, limb, property, and character, with as little warrant from common sense in the first instance as appeal to reason in the last. The ultima ratio regum proceeds upon a very different plea.

Common sense is neither priestcraft nor state-policy. Yet “there’s the rub that makes absurdity of so long life;” and at the same time, gives the skeptical philosophers the advantage over us. Till nature has fair play allowed it, and is not adulterated by political and political quacks (as it so often has been), it is impossible to appeal to it as a defence against the errors and extravagances of mere reason. If we talk of common sense, we are twitted with vulgar prejudice, and asked how we distinguish the one from the other; but common and received opinion is indeed a “compost heap” of crude notions, got together by the pride and passions of individuals, and reason is itself the thrall or manumitted slave of the same lordly and besotted masters, dragging its servile chain, or committing all sorts of Saturnalian licenses, the moment it feels itself freed from it. -If ten millions of Englishmen are furious in thinking themselves right in making war upon thirty millions of Frenchmen, and if the last are equally bent upon thinking the others always in the wrong, though it is a common and national prejudice, both opinions cannot be the dictate of good sense; but it may be the infatuated policy of one or both governments to keep their subjects always at a variance. If a few centuries ago all Europe believed in the infallibility of the Pope, this was not an opinion derived from the proper exercise or erroneous direction of the common sense of the people; common sense had nothing to do with it - they believed whatever their priests told them.

England at present is divided into Whigs and Tories, Churchmen and Dissenters, both parties have numbers on their side; but common sense and party spirit are two different things. Sects and heresies are upheld partly by sympathy, and partly by the love of contradiction; if there was nobody of a different way of thinking, they would fall to pieces of themselves. If a whole court say the same thing, this is no proof that they think it, but that the individual at the head of the court has said it; if a mob agree for a while in shouting the dame watchword, this is not to me an example of the sensus communis , they only repeat what they have heard repeated by others. If indeed a large proportion of the people are in want of food, of clothing, of shelter, - if they are sick, miserable, scorned, oppressed - and if each feeling it in himself they all say so with one voice and one heart and lift up their hands to second their appeal, this I should say was but the dictate of common sense, the cry of nature. But to waive this part of the argument, which it is needless to push farther, - I believe that the best way to instruct mankind is not by pointing out to them their mutual errors, but by teaching them to think rightly on indifferent matters, where they will listen with patience in order to be amused, and where they do not consider a definition or a syllogism as the greatest injury you can offer them.

There is no rule for expression. It’s got at solely by feeling, that is, on the principle of the association of ideas, and by transferring what has been found to hold good in one case (with the necessary modifications) to others. A certain look has been remarked strongly indicative of a certain passion or trait of character, and we attach the same meaning to it or are affected in the same pleasurable or painful manner by it, where it exists in a less degree, though we can define neither the look itself nor the modification of it. Having got the general clue, the exact result may be left to the imagination to vary, to extenuate or aggravate it according to circumstances. In the admirable profile of Oliver Cromwell after —-, the drooping eyelids, as if drawing a veil over the fixed, penetrating glance, the nostrils somewhat distended, and lips compressed so as hardly to let the breath escape him, denote the character of the man for high-reaching policy and deep designs as plainly as they can be written. How is that we decipher this expression in the face? First, by feeling it; and how is it that we feel it? Not by pre-established rules, but by the instinct of analogy, by the principle of association, which is subtle and sure in proportion as it is variable and indefinite.

A circumstance, apparently of no value, shall alter the whole interpretation to be put upon an expression or action; and it shall alter it thus powerfully because in proportion to its very insignificance it shows a strong general principle at work that extends in its ramifications to the smallest things. This in fact will make all the difference between minuteness and subtlety or refinement; for a small or trivial effect may in given circumstances imply the operation of a great power. Stillness may be the result of a blow too powerful to be resisted; silence may be imposed by feelings too agonizing for utterance. The minute, the trifling and insipid is that which is little in itself, in its causes and its consequences; the subtle and refined is that which is slight and evanescent at first sight, but which mounts up to a mighty sum in the end, which is the essential part of itself, and where more is meant than meets the eye or ear. We complain sometimes of littleness in a Dutch picture, where there are vast number of distinct parts and objects, each small in itself, and leading to nothing else. A sky of Claude’s cannot fall under this censure, where one imperceptible gradation is as it were the scale to another, where the broad arch of heaven is piled up endlessly intermediate gold and azure tints, and where an infinite number of minute, scarce noticed particulars blend and melt into universal harmony. The subtlety in Shakespeare, of which there is an immense deal scattered everywhere up and down, is always the instrument of passion, the vehicle of character. The action of a man pulling his hat over his forehead is indifferent enough in itself, and generally speaking, may mean anything or nothing; but in the circumstances in which Macduff is placed, it is neither insignificant nor equivocal.

What! man ne’er pull your hat upon your brows,

It admits but of one interpretation or inference, that which follows it:

Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak, Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

The passage in the same play, in which Duncan and his attendants are introduced, commenting on the beauty and situation of Macbeth’s castle, though familiar in itself, has been often praised for the striking contrast it presents of the scenes which follow. - The same look in different circumstances may convey a totally different expression. Thus the eye turned round to look at you without turning the head indicates generally slyness or suspicion; but if this is combined with large expanded eyelids or fixed eyebrows, as we see in Titian’s pictures, it will denote calm contemplation or piercing sagacity, without anything of meanness or fear of being observed. In other cases, it may imply merely indolent enticing voluptuousness, as in Lely’s portraits of women. The languor and weakness of the eyelids give the amorous turn to the expression. How should there be a rule for all this beforehand, seeing it depends on circumstances ever varying, and scarce discernible but by their effect on the mind? Rules are applicable to abstractions, but expression is concrete and individual. We know the meaning of certain looks, and we feel how they modify one another in conjunction. But we cannot have a separate rule to judge of all their combinations in different degrees and circumstances, without foreseeing all those combinations, which is impossible; or if we did foresee them, we should only be where we are, that is, we could only make the rule as we now judge without it, from imagination and the feeling of the moment.

The absurdity of reducing expression to a preconcerted system was perhaps never more evidently shown than in a picture of the Judgement of Solomon by so great a man as N. Poussin, which I once heard admired for the skill and discrimination of the artist in making all the women, who are ranged on one side, in the greatest alarm at the sentence of the judge, while all the men on the opposite side see through the design of it. Nature does not go to work or cast things in a regular mould on this sort of way. I once heard a person remark of another - “He has an eye like a vicious horse.” This was a fair analogy. We all, I believe, have noticed the look of a horse’s eye, just before he is going to bite or kick. But will any one, therefore, describe to me exactly what that look is? It was the same acute observer that said of a self sufficient prating music-master -“He talks on all subjects at sight” - which expressed the man at once by an allusion to his profession. The coincidence was indeed perfect. Nothing else could compare to the easy assurance with which this gentleman would volunteer an explanation of things of which he was most ignorant, but the nonchalance with which a musician sits down to a harpsichord to play a piece he has never seen before.

My physiognomical friend would not have hit on this mode of illustration without knowing the profession of the subject of his criticism; but having this hint given him, it instantly suggested itself to his “sure trailing”. The manner of the speaker was evident; and the association of the music-master sitting down to play at sight, lurking in his mind, was immediately called out by the strength of his impression of the character. The feeling of character and the felicity of invention on explaining it were nearly allied to each other. The first was so wrought up and running over that the transition to the last was very easy and unavoidable. When Mr. Kean was so much praised for the action of Richard in his last struggle with his triumphant antagonist, where he stands, after his sword is wrested from him, with his hands stretched out, “as if his will could not be disarmed, and the very phantoms of his despair had a withering power,” he said that he borrowed it from seeing the last efforts of Painter in his fight with Oliver. This assuredly did not lessen the merit of it. Thus it ever is with a man of real genius. He has the feeling of truth already shrined in his own breast, and his eye is still bent on Nature of see how she expresses herself. When we thoroughly understand the subject, it is easy to translate from one language into another.

Raphael, in muffling up the figure of Elymas the Sorcerer in his garments, appears to have extended the idea of blindness even to his clothes. Was this design? Probably not; but merely the feeling of analogy thoughtlessly suggesting this device, which being so suggested was retained and carried on, because it flattered or fell in with the original feeling. The tide of passion, when strong, overflows and gradually insinuates itself into all nooks and corners of the mind. Invention (of the best kind) I therefore do not think so distinct a thing from feeling as some are apt to imagine. The springs of pure feeling will rise and fill the moulds of fancy that are fit to receive it. There are some striking coincidences of colour in well-composed pictures, as in a straggling weed in the foreground streaked with blue or red to answer to a blue or red drapery, to the tone of the flesh or an opening in the sky:- not that this was intended, or done by rule (for then it would presently become affected and ridiculous), but the eye being imbued with a certain colour, repeats and varies it from a natural sense of harmony, a secret craving and appetite for beauty, which in the same manner soothes and gratifies the eye of taste, though the cause in not understood. Tact, finesse, is nothing but the being completely aware of the feeling belonging to certain situations, passions, &c., and the being consequently sensible to their slightest indications or movements in others.

One of the most remarkable instances of this sort of faculty is the following story, told of Lord Shaftesbury, the grandfather of the author of the Characteristics. He had been to dine with Lady Clarendon and her daughter, who was at that time privately married to the Duke of York (afterwards James II), and as he returned home with another nobleman who had accompanied him, he suddenly turned to him, and said, “Depend upon it, the Duke has married Hyde’s daughter.” His companion could not comprehend what he meant; but on explaining himself, he said, her mother behaved to her with and attention and a marked respect that is impossible to account for in any other way; and I am sure of it.” His conjecture was carrying the prophetic spirit of common sense as far as it could go. Genius or originality is, for the most part, some strong quality on the mind, answering to and bringing out some new and striking quality in nature.

Imagination is, more properly, the power of carrying on a given feeling into other situations, which must be done best according of the hold which the feeling itself has taken of the mind. In new and unknown combinations, the impression must act by sympathy, and not by rule, but there can be no sympathy where there is no passion, no original interest. The personal interest may in some cases oppress and circumscribe the imaginative faculty, as in the instance of Rousseau: but in general the strength and consistency of the imagination will be in proportion to the strength and depth of feeling; and it is rarely that a man even of lofty genius will be able to do more than carry on his own feelings and character, or some prominent and ruling passion, into fictitious and uncommon situations. Milton has by allusion embodies a great part of his political and personal history in the chief characters and incidents of Paradise Lost. He has, no doubt, wonderfully adapted and heightened them, but the elements are the same; you trace the bias and opinions of the man in the creations of the poet. Shakespeare (almost alone) seems to be a man of genius, raised above the definition of genius. “Born universal heir to all humanity,” he was “as one, in suffering all who suffered nothing;” with a perfect sympathy with all things, yet alike indifferent to all: who did not tamper with nature or warp her to his own purposes; who “knew all qualities with a learned spirit, “instead of judging of them by his own predilections; and was rather “a pipe for the Muse’s finger to play what stop she pleased,” than anxious to set up any character or pretensions of his own. His genius consisted in the faculty of transforming himself at will into whatever he chose: his originality was the power of seeing every object from the exact point of view in which others would see it. He was the Proteus of human intellect.

Genius in ordinary is a more obstinate and less versatile thing. It is sufficiently exclusive and self-willed, quaint and peculiar. It does some one thing by virtue of doing nothing else: it excels in some one pursuit by being blind to all excellence but its own. It is just the reverse of the chameleon; for it does not borrow, but lends its colours to all about it: or like the glow-worm, discloses a little circle of gorgeous light in the twilight of obscurity, in the night of intellect that surrounds it.

So did Rembrandt. If ever there was a man of genius, he was one, in the proper sense of the term. He lived in and revealed to others a world of his own, and might be said to have invented a new view of nature. He did not discover things out of nature, in fiction or fairy land, or make a voyage to the moon “to descry new lands, rivers, or mountains in her spotty globe,” but saw things in nature that every one had missed before him, and gave other eyes to see them with. This is the test and triumph or originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.

Rembrandt’s conquests were not over the ideal, but the real. He did not contrive a new story or character, but we nearly owe to a fifth part of painting, the knowledge of chiaroscuro - a distinct power and element in art and nature. He had a steadiness, a firm keeping of mind and eye, that first stood the shock of “fierce extremes” in light and shade, or reconciled the greatest obscurity and the greatest brilliancy into perfect harmony: and he therefore was the first to hazard this appearance upon canvas, and give full effect to what he saw and delighted in. He was led to adopt this style of broad and startling contrast from its congeniality of his own feelings: his mind grappled with that which afforded the best exerciser to its master-powers: he was bold in act, because he was urged on by a strong native impulse. Originality is then nothing but nature and feeling working in the mind. A man does not affect to be original: he is so, because he cannot help it, and often without knowing it.

This extraordinary artist indeed might be said to have had a particular organ for colour. His eye seemed to come in contact with it as a feeling, to lay hold of it as a substance, rather than to contemplate it as a visual object. The texture of his landscapes is “of the earth, earthy” - his clouds are humid, heavy, slow; his shadows are “darkness that may be felt,” a “palpable obscure;” his lights are lumps of liquid splendour! There is something more in this than can be accounted for from design or accident: Rembrandt was not a man made up of two or three rules and directions for acquiring genius.

I am afraid I shall hardly write so satisfactory a character of Mr. Wordsworth, though he too, like Rembrandt, has a faculty of making something out of nothing, that is, out of himself, by the medium through which he sees and with which he clothes the barrenness subject. Mr. Wordsworth is the last man to “look abroad into universality,” if that alone constituted genius: he looks at home into himself, and is “content with riches fineless.” He would in the other case be “poor as winter,” if he had nothing but general capacity to trust to. He is the greatest, that is, the most original poet of the present day, only because is the greatest egotist. He is “self-involved, not dark.” He sits in the centre of his own being, and there “enjoys bright day.” He does not relate exclusively and wholly to himself, is foreign to his views. He contemplates a whole-length figure of himself, he looks along the unbroken line of his personal identity. He thrusts aside all other objects, all other interests with scorn and impatience, that he may repose on his own being, that he may dig out the treasures of thought contained in it, that he may unfold the precious stores of a mind for ever brooding over itself.

His genius is the effect of his individual character. He stamps that character, that deep individual interest, on whatever he meets. The object is nothing but as it furnishes food for internal meditation, for old associations. If there has been no other being in the universe, Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry would have been just what it is. If there had been neither love nor friendship, neither ambition nor pleasure not business in the world, the author of the Lyrical Ballads need not have been greatly changed from what he is - might still have “kept the noiseless tenour of his way,” retired in the sanctuary of his own heart, hallowing the Sabbath of his own thoughts. With the passions, the pursuits, and imaginations of other men he does not profess to sympathize, but “finds tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” With a mind averse from outward objects, but ever intent upon its own workings, he hangs a weight of thought and feeling upon every trifling circumstance connected with his past history. The note of the cuckoo sounds in his ear like the voice of other years; the daisy spreads its leaves in the rays of boyish delight, that stream from his thoughtful eyes; the rainbow lifts its proud arch in heaven but to mark his progress from infancy to manhood; and old thorn is buried, bowed done under the mass of associations he has wound about it; and to him, as he himself beautifully says,

The meanest flow’r that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

It is this power of habitual sentiment, or of transferring the interest of our conscious existence to whatever gently solicits attention, and is a link in the chain of association without rousing our passions or hurting our pride, that is the striking feature in Mr. Wordsworth’s mind and poetry. Others have left and shown this power before, as Wither Burns, &c., but none have felt it so intensely and absolutely as to lend to it the voice of inspiration, as to make it the foundation of a new style and school of poetry. His strength, as it so happens, arises from the excess of his weakness. But he has opened a new avenue to the human heart, has explored another secret haunt and nook of nature, “sacred to verse, and sure of everlasting fame.” Compared with his lines, Lord Byron’s stanza are but exaggerated common-place, and Walter Scott’s poetry (not his prose) old wives’ fables. There is no one in whom I have been more disappointed than in the writer here spoken of, nor with whom I am more disposed of certain points to quarrel: but the love of truth and justice which obliges me to do this, will not suffer me to blench his merits. Do what he can, he cannot help being an original-minded man. His poetry is not servile. While the cuckoo returns in the spring, while the daisy looks bright in the sun, while the rainbow lifts its head above the storm-

Yet I’ll remember thee, Glencairn, And all that thou hast done for me!

Sir Joshua Reynolds, in endeavouring to show that there is no such thing as proper originality, a spirit emanating from the mind of the artist and shining through his works, has traced Raphael through a number of figures which he has borrowed from Masaccio and others. This is a bad calculation, If Raphael has only borrowed those figures from others, would he, even if Sir Joshua’s sense, have been entitled to the praise of originality? Plagiarism, I presume, in so far as it is plagiarism, is not originality. Salvator is considered by many as a great genius. He was what they call an irregular genius. My notion of genius is not exactly the same as theirs. It has also been made a question whether there is not more genius in Rembrandt’s Three Trees than in all Claude Lorraine’s landscapes? I do not know how that might be; but it was enough for Claude to have been a perfect landscape painter.

Capacity is not the same thing as genius. Capacity may be described to relate to the quantity of knowledge, however acquired, -genius to its quality and the mode of acquiring it. Capacity is the power over given ideas or combinations of ideas; genius is the power over those which are not given, and for which no obvious or precise rule can be laid down. Or capacity is power of any sort; genius is power of a different sort from what has yet been shown. A retentive memory, a clear understanding is capacity, but it is not genius. The admirable Crichton was a person of prodigious capacity; but there is no proof (that I know) that he has an atom of genius. His verses that remain are dull and sterile. He could learn all that was known of any subject: he could do anything if others could show him the way to do it. This was very wonderful: but that is all you can say of it. It requires a good capacity to play well at chess: but, after all, it is a game of skill, and not of genius. Know what you will of it, the understanding still moves in certain tracks in which others have trod before, quicker or slower, with more or less comprehension and presence of mind. The greatest skill strikes out nothing for itself, from its own peculiar resources; the nature of the game is a thing determinate and fixed: there is no royal or poetical road to check-mate your adversary.

There is no place for genius but in the indefinite and unknown. The discovery of the binomial theorem was an effort of genius; but there was none shown in Jedediah Buxton’s being able to multiply 9 figures by 9 in his head. If he could have multiplied 90 figures by 90 instead of 9, it would have been equally useless toil and trouble. He is a man of capacity who possesses considerable intellectual riches: he is a man of genius who finds out a vein of new ore. Originality is the seeing nature differently from others, and yet as it is in itself. It is not singularity or affectation, but the discovery of new and valuable truth. All the world do not see the whole meaning of any object they have been looking at. Habit blinds them to some things: shortsightedness to others. Every mind is not a gauge and measure of truth. Nature has her surface and her dark recesses. She is deep, obscure, and infinite. It is only minds on whom she makes her fullest impressions that can penetrate her shrine or unveil her Holy of Holies. It is only those whom she has filled with her spirit that have the boldness or the power to reveal her mysteries to others. But nature has a thousand aspects, and one man can only draw out one of them. Whoever does this is a man of genius. One displays her force, another her refinement; one her power of harmony, another her suddenness of contrast; one her beauty of form, another her splendour of colour. Each does that for which he is best filled by his particular genius, that is to say, by some quality of mind into which the quality of the object sinks deepest, where it finds the most cordial welcome, is perceived to its utmost extent, and where again it forces its way out from the fullness with which it has taken possession of the mind of the student. The imagination gives out what it has first absorbed by congeniality of temperament, what it has attracted and moulded into itself by elective affinity, as the loadstone draws and impregnates iron. A little originality is more esteemed and sought for than the greatest acquired talent, because it throw a new light upon things, and is peculiar to the individual. The other is common; and may be had for the asking, to any amount.

The value of any work is to be judged of by the quantity of originality contained in it. A very little of this will go a great way. If Goldsmith had never written anything but the two or three first chapters of the Vicar of Wakefield, or the character of a Village Schoolmaster, they would have stamped him a man of genius. The Editors of Encyclopedias are not usually reckoned the first literary characters of the age. The works, of which they have the management, contain a great deal of knowledge, like chests or warehouses, but the golds are not their own. We should as soon think of admiring the shelves of a library; but the shelves are useful and respectable.

I was once applied to , in a delicate emergency, to write an article on a difficult subject for an Encyclopedia, and was advised to take time and give it a systematic and scientific form, to avail myself of all the knowledge that was to be obtained on the subject, and arrange it with clearness and method. I made answer that as to the first, I had taken time to do all that I ever pretended to do, as I had thought incessantly on different matters for twenty years of my life; that I had no particular knowledge of the subject in question, and no head for arrangement; and that the utmost I could do in such a case would be, when a systematic and scientific article was prepared, to write marginal notes upon it, to insert a remark or illustration of my own (not to be found in former Encyclopedias) or to suggest a better definition than had been offered in the text.

There are two sorts of writing. The first is compilation; and consists in collecting and stating all that is already known of any question in the best possible manner, for the benefit of the uninformed reader. An author of this class is a very learned amanuensis of other peoples thoughts. The second sort proceeds on an entirely different principle. Instead of bringing down the account of knowledge to the point at which it has already arrived, it professes to start from that point on the strength of the writer’s individual reflections; and supposing the reader in possession of what is already known, supplies deficiencies, fills up certain blanks, and quits the beaten road in search of new tracts of observation or sources of feeling. It is in vain to object to this last style that it is disjointed, disproportioned, and irregular. It is merely a set of additions and corrections to other men’s works, or to the common stock of human knowledge, printed separately. You might as well expect a continued chain of reasoning in the notes to a book. It skips all the tripe, intermediate, level common-places of the subject, and only stops at the difficult passages of the human mind, or touches on some striking point that has been overlooked in previous editions.

A view of a subject, to be connected and regular, cannot be all new. A writer will always be charged either with paradox or common-place, either with dulness or affectation. But we have no right to demand from any one more than he pretends to. There is indeed a medium in all things, but to unite opposite excellencies is a task ordinarily too hard for mortality. He who succeeds in what he aims at, or who takes the lead in any one mode or path of excellence, may think himself very well off. It would not be fair to complain of the style of an Encyclopedia as dull, as wanting volatile salt; nor of the style of an Essay because it is too light and sparkling, because it is not a caput mortuum. So it is rather an odd objection to a work that it is made up entirely of “brilliant passages” - at least it is a fault that can be found with few works, and the book might be pardoned for its singularity. The censure might indeed seem like adroit flattery, if it were not passed on an author whom any objection is sufficient to render unpopular and ridiculous. I grant it is best to unite solidity with show, general information with particular ingenuity. This is the pattern of a perfect style: but I myself do not pretend to be a perfect writer. In fine, we do not banish light French wines from our tables, or refuse to taste sparkling Champagne when we can get it because it has not the body of Old Port. Besides, I do not know that dulness is strength, or that an observation is slight because it is striking. Mediocrity, insipidity, want of character is the great fault.

Mediocribus esse poetis Non Dii, non homines, non concessêre columnae. [“Neither is this privilege allowed to prose-writers in our time any more than to poets formerly.”]

It is not then acuteness of organs or extent of capacity that constitutes rare genius or produces the most exquisite models of art, but an intense sympathy with some one beauty or distinguishing characteristic in nature. Irritability alone, or the interest taken in certain things may supply the place of genius in weak and otherwise ordinary minds. As there are certain instruments filled to perform certain kinds of labour, there are certain minds so framed as to produce certain chef-d’oeuvres in art and literature, which is surely the best use they can be put to. If a man had all sorts of instruments in his shop and wanted one, he would rather have that one than be supplied with a double set of all the others. If he had them twice over, he could only do what he can do as it is, whereas without that one he perhaps cannot finish any one work he has in hand.

So if a man can do one thing better than anybody else, the value of this one thing is what he must stand or fall by, and his being able to do a hundred other things merely as well as anybody else would not alter the sentence or add to his respectability; on the contrary, his being able to do so many other things well would probably interfere with and incumber him in the execution of the only thing that others cannot do as well as he, and so far be a drawback and a disadvantage. More people, in fact, fail from a multiplicity of talents and pretensions than from an absolute poverty of resources. I have given instances of this elsewhere. Perhaps Shakespeare’s tragedies would in some respects have been better if he had never written comedies at all; and in that case, his comedies might well have been spared, though they must have cost us some regret. Racine, it is said, might have rivalled Moliere in comedy; but he gave up the cultivation of his comic talents to devote himself wholly to the tragic Muse. If, as the French tell us, he inconsequence attained to the perfection of tragic composition, this was better than writing comedies as well as Moliere and tragedies as well as Crebillon. Yet I count those persons fools who thing it a pity Hogarth did not succeed better in serious subjects. The division of labour is an excellent principle in taste as well as mechanics. Without this, I find from Adam Smith, we could not have a pin made to the degree of perfection it is. We do not, on any rational scheme of criticism, inquire into the variety of a man’s excellences, or the number of his works, or his facility of production. Venice Preserved is sufficient for Otway’s fame.

I hate all those nonsensical stories about Lope de Vega and his writing a play in a morning before breakfast. He had time enough to do it after. If a man leaves behind him any work which is a model in its kind, we have not right to ask whether he could do anything else, or how he did it, or how long he was about it. All that talent which is not necessary to the actual quantity of excellence existing in the world, loses its object, is so much waste talent or talent to let. I heard a sensible man say he should like to do some one thing better than all the rest of the world, in and everything else to be like all the rest of the world.

Why should a man do more than his part? The rest is vanity and vexation of spirit. We look with jealous and grudging eyes at all those qualifications which are not essential; first, because they are superfluous, and next, because we suspect they will be prejudicial. Why does Mr. Kean play all those harlequin tricks of singing, dancing, fencing, &c.? They say, “It is for his benefit.” It is not for his reputation. Garrick indeed shone equally in comedy and tragedy. But he was first, not second-rate in both. There is not a greater impertinence than to ask, if a man is clever out of his profession. I have heard of people trying to cross-examine Mrs. Siddons. I would as soon try to entrap one of the Elgin Marbles into an argument. Good nature and common sense are required from all people; but one proud distinction is enough for any one individual to possess or to aspire to.

MLA Citation

Hazlitt, William. “On genius and common sense.” 1822. Quotidiana. Ed. Patrick Madden. 8 Oct 2006. 21 Apr 2024 <http://essays.quotidiana.org/hazlitt/genius_and_common_sense/>.

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Quotidiana is an online anthology of "classical" essays, from antiquity to the early twentieth century. All essays and images are in the public domain. Commentaries are copyrighted, but may be used with proper attribution. Special thanks to the BYU College of Humanities and English Department for funding, and to Joey Franklin and Lara Burton , for tireless research assisting.

AWP 2007: Teaching the Classical Essay

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28 William Hazlitt

Dr. Neeru Tandon

27.1     LEARNING OUTCOME

27.2     SHORT BIOGRAPHY

27.3    WORKS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT

27.4      ON GUSTO

27.5    ON THE FEELING OF IMMORTALITY IN YOUTH

27.6     ON THE DISADVANTAGES OF INTELLECTUAL SUPERIORITY

27.7     FAMOUS QUOTES

27.8     PROSE STYLE

27.9     HAZLITT AS AN ESSAYIST

27.10     HAZLITT AS A CRITIC

27.11     HIS CONTRIBUTION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE

27.12     QUIZZES AND QUESTIONS

27.13     FURTHER READING

27.14     TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE

27.1 LEARNING OUTCOME: The students will learn about William Hazlitt, his essays and his prose style. The students will grasp the basic essentials about Hazlitt and his famous essays. Multiple-choice exercises will help them in assessing their knowledge and understanding of the work. Bibliography and list of websites will help them in their in-depth study and further  reading. Critical quotes and quotes from the book will also help them in understanding various literary aspects of his essays.

27.2 SHORT BIOGRAPHY

William Hazlitt was born on April 10, 1778, at Maidstone, Kent, England and died on Sept. 18, 1830, in Soho, London. He was the son of a Unitarian minister and his mother, Grace Loftus belonged to Wisbech. In 1783, the Reverend William Hazlitt immigrated with his family to America and founded the first Unitarian Church of Boston. But after an unsuccessful struggle he returned to England in the winter of 1786. He took a small parish in Wem, Shropshire, where young William Hazlitt attended school. As a teenager he adopted an unfriendly and disagreeable nature that remained with him throughout his life. He rather spent his time reading intensively which formed the basis of his wisdom. In 1793, Hazlitt was sent to the Hackney Theological College to become a dissenting minister. He did not share his father‟s religious enthusiasm save for the intellectual aspect of the religion. He soon decided against that profession and returned to Wem. He went to Paris with the aim of becoming a painter, but gradually convinced himself that he could not excel in this art. Though in 1802 he traveled to Paris to work in the Louvre but the war between England and France compelled him to return in a year‟s time. He wandered on foot about England for three years painting portraits at a charge of five guineas for each painting. His friends encouraged him to continue painting but in 1805 he turned to the study of philosophy that had always fascinated him and this love showed in his first book „On the Principles of Human  Action‟ . Hazlitt‟s literary endeavors could not get the success they deserved because of his political principles. Hazlitt was born in a time when a man‟s literary work, morals and intelligence would be judged by his politics. In 1808 he married Sarah Stoddart, a friend of Mary lamb, and the couple went to live at Winterslow on Salisbury Plain, which became Hazlitt‟s favorite place whenever he wanted to think, read and write. But as wife and husband they could not live for long and by 1818, they started living separately and in the year 1823 both agreed for a divorce. His second marriage with Mrs. Bridgewater, a widow, in 1824 and honeymooned leisurely in France, Switzerland and Italy. However, the second marriage also, like the first, could not prove lasting. Besides the two aforesaid marriages he had an unsuccessful love affair with Ms. Sarah Walker. Hazlitt suffered from the pain of despised love that affected his happiness throughout the remaining part of his life.

27.3 :HIS WORKS

EARLY WORKS

Hazlitt‟s literary work as an author started in 1805, with his first book „On the Principles of Human Action‟ which was later used as the basis of his lectures on „The Rise and Progress of Modern Philosophy‟. In 1806, He published „Free Thoughts on Public Affairs‟, a political pamphlet, followed in 1807 by „The Eloquence of the British Senate‟. This was a collection of short biographies of statesmen and was a reply to the essay on Population by Malthus, an English cleric and scholar of his time. By the end of 1811 Hazlitt faced financial problems even though he had productively completed a number of literary assignments. His literary works of this period were not insignificant as the style of later works developed from here.

LATER WORKS

Hazlitt was not popular with the public because of his awkwardness and temperamental nature.

He got regular employment, at four pounds a week, as a reporter to the House of Commons.

He then began to give a course of lectures in philosophy in London and began work as a reporter in the Morning Chronicle, and gained the reputation of a critic, journalist, and essayist. His collected dramatic criticism appeared as „A View of the English Stage‟ in 1818. He started writing for Leigh Hunt‟s journal „Examiner‟ ; and from there they went on to publish „The Round Table‟, 2 vol. (1817), and out of the 52 essays Hazlitt wrote 40. Also in 1817 his article on „Characters of Shakespeare‟s Plays‟ received endorsement by critics and readers. His aggressive articulation of views in the journals came because of the quarrels he often had with friends (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey) but at the same time, he made new friends and admirers among them being Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats and strengthened his reputation as a lecturer, delivering talks „On the English Poets‟ (published 1818) and „On the English Comic Writers‟ (published 1819). He also published a collection of political essays and a volume on „Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth‟ (1819) but after this he devoted himself to essays for various journals mainly writing for John Scott‟s „London Magazine‟. All of them possess the movement and freshness of spoken word. It is after Dryden that English Literature saw such vital and Catholic comments. After his divorce he soon fell in love with the daughter of his London landlord but the affair ended acrimoniously; the account of which Hazlitt described in the strange „Liber Amoris‟ ; or, „The New Pygmalion‟ (1823). Even so, many of his best essays were written during this difficult period and were collected in his two most famous books: „Table Talk‟ (1821) and „The Plain Speaker‟ (1826). Others were posthumously edited by his son, William, as „Sketches and Essays‟ (1829), Literary  Remains‟ (1836), and „Winterslow‟ (1850) and some by his biographer, P.P. Howe, as „New Writings‟ (1925–27). Hazlitt‟s other works during this period of productive writing included „Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England‟ (1824), with its celebrated essay on the Dulwich gallery. Hazlitt‟s marriage to widow Bridgewater was resented by his son and part of this second marriage was spent abroad, an experience documented in „Notes of a Journey in France and Italy‟ (1826). In France he began writing „Life of Napoleon‟, 4 vol. (1828–30) which was not very successful, and in 1825 he published some of his most successful writing in „The Spirit of the Age‟ . His last book, ‘ Conversations of James Northcote‟ (1830), recorded his long friendship with that eccentric painter.

27.4: ON GUSTO

„On Gusto‟ was first published in „The Examiner‟ on 26th. May 1816 and again it was reproduced in „The Round Table‟. Being a painter himself Hazlitt has shown a deep knowledge of the art of painting. He has also explained gusto in relation to Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Dryden. He has also discussed some prose writers. Hazlitt defines Gusto by defining it as the power or passion in art. A work of art has color or form but it is expression of it that matters and the more passionate or powerful the expression it the more expressive it is. He gives critical opinion about great painters of England and Europe like Titan, the famous Italian painter, Michael Angelo, Rubens, Albino, Correggio, Claude and Raphael. First he discusses the painting of Titan and finds that all his pictures are full of gusto. He finds that the pictures of Titan have great gentleness and delicacy and give immense delight to the viewer and the paintings of Albino  are like ivory. Reubens‟ drawings are full of beauty and are fresh like blooming flowers. Hazlitt comments that through gusto in painting many senses are excited as the impression formed on one sense excites the other. Hazlitt states that the paintings of Michael Angelo are full of gusto because they impact the eye powerfully. His pictures give us a sense of vigor, moral excellence and intellectual honesty on the other hand the paintings of Correggio lack in gusto. Titan‟s pictures of landscape are filled with gusto and the colors and outlines used by him are striking. He recalls a particular painting of landscape which he saw in the Orleans gallery and found it to be most appealing in power and passion. The painter Rubens exhibited great power of gusto in his art while Raphael‟s artistic representations excelled in expression. According to him Raphael never stepped out of Rome therefore his paintings lack variety and do not impress much. Claude‟s landscapes reach artistic perfection but lack in gusto. He does not clearly find any reason to explain this characteristic of Claude‟s pictures but feels they have no power to touch or titillate the senses of the spectator. He also discusses the art of Greek statues which he again feels are full of gusto. The Greek statues are faultless in form; they engage the whole mind of the onlooker and they are ultimate and spiritual. The power in them comes through a beauty that is divine. At the end of the essay Hazlitt talks about the works of Shakespeare and Milton. Shakespeare, he says, has been a prolific writer and produced a large number of dramas but the gusto, power or passion anticipated in the works is sporadic and intermittent but Milton on the other hand has great gusto. Every line of Milton is potent and full of gusto but the gusto of Pope and Dryden is quite average. Of all the prose writers he finds the prose of Boccaccio and Rabelais to be full of gusto and impressive.

27.5 ON THE FEELING OF IMMORTALITY IN YOUTH

In the essay Hazlitt says at a young age `No young man believes he shall ever die…. There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amend for everything. To be young is to be as one of the Immortals. One half of time is spent- the other half remains in store for us with all its countless treasures, for there is no line drawn, and we see no limit to our hopes and wishes….

Death, old age are words without a meaning, a dream, a fiction, with which we have nothing to do. Others may have undergone, or may still undergo them. The youth “bear a charmed life,” which laughs to scorn all such idle fancies. As in setting out on a delightful journey, we strains our sight ever forward… and sees no end to prospect after prospect, new objects presenting themselves as we advance, so in the outset of life we see no end to our desires nor to the opportunities of gratifying them.” So according to him this is the reason why young people do not care for religion because they never have done but have always thought of themselves as gods, Immortals, as Hazlitt puts it, and there is really only room for one god at a time in each life. Hazlitt’s statement, “We know our existence only by ourselves” gives us insight into his emphasis upon impressions made in life and the importance of personal experience in his writing. He writes: “Our first and strongest impressions are borrowed from the mighty scene that is opened to us, and we unconsciously transfer its durability as well as its splendor to ourselves”. What Hazlitt is pointing to is a tendency to turn inward to define one’s reality. We see ourselves in relation to nature as not a microscopic portion, like the flower that blooms and then withers away, but as having the same regenerative power and immortality as nature. He writes: To see the golden sun, the azure sky, the outstretched ocean; to walk upon the green earth, and be lord of a thousand creatures; to look down yawning precipices or over distant sunny vales; to see the world spread out under one’s feet on a map; to bring the stars near. Hazlitt uses images of the  natural world throughout his essay; he compares dying people to falling leaves and compares the joy and hope of youth to flowers. In fact, Hazlitt suggests an interchangeability between the human race and nature and writes, “Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night. “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth” helps to illustrate Hazlitt’s strong connection to the philosophy of the Romantic Movement and his distaste for impermeable intellectualism. He continues: “…if by our intellectual superiority we survive ourselves in this world, by our virtues and faith we may attain an interest in another, and a higher state of being, and may thus be recipients at the same time of men and of angel”. Hazlitt expresses a parallel between the station of man and the station of God, which aligns with his argument that in youth, men indeed feel God like, and have difficult in coming to terms with their own mortality. As we see the flowers both bloom and wither, trees shed their leaves in the winter and sprout new ones in the spring, and the circularity of the natural world and its ability to renew itself on a continual basis we tend to imagine ourselves with this same transformative power. He notes that our earliest experiences with natural world that surrounds us are those which are burned most vividly into our minds. We and Nature are therefore one”. Hazlitt expands upon this. Indeed Hazlitt imagines human beings as having the same power to shape and define their experiences and their morality as God has to shape the universe. He positions humans with altitude, and says we are “lord(s) of a thousand creatures” that “look down yawning precipices or over distant sunny vales”. For Hazlitt, the answer lies in construction sentences that mimic the immenseness of nature in terms of their size and attempt to do justice to its natural splendor by employing eloquent language. The tendency for humans to compare themselves to supernatural forces brings out another of Hazlitt’s personal views upon religion. Hazlitt gives imagination a pivotal role in the moral life of man.

27.6 ON THE DISADVANTAGES OF INTELLECTUAL SUPERIORITY

The essay „On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority‟ came out in Table Talk as the 29th essay. In the essay Hazlitt says that intellectual superiority brings the power of knowing more and seeing farther than the others. This aspect should not be misunderstood by others. An intellectually superior man tends to become unintelligible and complex. He is likely to talk in paradoxes that fail to reach the common person. The more original his ideas the more distant he becomes to the reader or listener. The happiness of life does not become better or worse than the people one meets. If you are beneath them you are trampled upon but if you are above them then the people show a mortifying level of indifference that causes pique upon the intellectually superior man. What is the use of being moral in a night cellar or wise in Bedlam? By not acting appropriately as time demands then we cut ourselves off from good company and society. We speak a language not understood by others, have our peculiar notions and are treated as of a different species. The intellectually superior person is like steers among wild beasts. Those who possess greater refinement and wisdom are viewed with suspicion and hostility by their neighbors. If an intelligent man, by softening his attitude, wins his neighbors then they may fear him less but hate him more. They will be more determined to take revenge for his superiority. All the humility in the world is considered as a weakness or folly. The intellectually superior may forget they are an author or an artist but the common man does not forget that he is nothing nor leave a chance to show that the superior person is just the same as he is. They copy the  intellectually superior be it his dress, his manner of entering a room, his eating habits, and his particular phrase which they repeat becomes a standing joke. They watch the contradictions in his character, whether he looks grave or ill, whether he is in or out of pocket, and all the petty circumstances in which he resembles or is unlike them give reasons for them to indict him based on the imagination of their mind. In any other person such things would go unnoticed but of a person they had so much about find they cannot understand him and will speak highly about some book which they know he does not like.

Intellect is not like bodily strength and one has no hold of the understanding of others except by their sympathy. By knowing more about a subject does not give superiority or power over others, rather, it makes it impossible to make an impression on the common person. It causes more distance between the intellectually person and society. It is more of a stumbling block at every turn. All that brings great pride and pleasure becomes lost in the vulgar eye. What pleases the common man becomes a matter of distaste and indifference to the intellectually superior man. Hazlitt says he loves hospitality and respect and civility for him is a jewel. He likes a little comfortable cheer and careless indolent chat. He hates to be always wise or aims at wisdom. He has to deal with literary cabals, critics, actors, essay writers, without taking them out for recreation or all the places he visits. He desires for goodwill and does not desire to pose at all times on various questions and topics. He has to face various disadvantages of being an author. Generally all his opinions met with contrary comments and ridicule. One of the miseries of intellectual pretensions is that nineteenths of the time the people he came in contact with did not know whether he was an imposter or not. There is always the danger of losing goodwill of numerous friends on ill reports which cannot be gained by good ones. The impertinence of admiration is scarcely more tolerable than the demonstration of contempt. People unnecessarily  admire and flatter him and his style in high sounding words. They have a great value for character than writing. Another danger comes from fault finders who betray the intellectual. Sycophants and flatterers are unintentionally treacherous and fickle. They are prone to inordinately admire at first and when they do not find a reason to continue doing so they turn upon their idol and criticize him. To prove themselves right they start fault finding and are happy to see that this works out better for them than flattery. They have the organ of wonder and the organ of fear in a prominent degree. The first requires new objects of admiration to satisfy its uneasy cravings and the second makes them crouch to power wherever they see it. They are favorable to all parties and are ready to betray anyone out of sheer weakness and servility. He does not find great intellectual attainments are any recommendation to the women. They puzzle the intellectually superior man and are a main diversion to the main question. If scholars talk ti ladies of what they know then the ladies are none the wiser and if they talk of other things then they prove themselves fools to them. Scholars are no match for chambermaids. Lastly he says that no illustration is needed to prove that the most original and profound thinkers are the most successful or popular writers. According to him this is not a temporary disadvantage as many great philosophers were followed while they were living but forgotten as soon as they were dead and the name of Hobbes is perhaps sufficient to prove the truth of his statement.

27.7 FAMOUS QUOTES

On the Love of the Country

“We do not connect the same feelings with the works of art as with those of Nature, because we refer them to man, and associate with them the separate interests and passions which we know belong to those who are the authors or possessors of them.”

On Poe t ry

“Poetry is in all its shapes the language of the imagination and the passions, of fancy and will. Nothing, therefore, can be more absurd than the outcry which has been sometimes raised by frigid and pedantic critics, for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and reason: for the end and use of poetry, ‘both at the first and now, was and is to hold the mirror up to nature’, seen through the medium of passion and imagination, not divested of that medium by means of literal truth or abstract reason.”

On Coleridge: From “Lectures on the English Poets”

“His Ancient Mariner is his most remarkable performance, and the only one that I could point out to anyone as giving an adequate idea of his great natural powers. … He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on forever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort; but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him from off his feet.”

Disappointment

“An author wastes his time in painful study and obscure researches, … when he thinks to grasp the luckless prize, finds it not worth the trouble … He thinks that the attainment of acknowledged excellence will secure him the expression of those feelings in others, which the image and hope of it had excited in his own breast, but instead of that, he meets with … squint-eyed suspicion, idiot wonder, and grinning scorn.”

On   Reading   Old   Books

“I have more confidence in the dead than the living. … If you want to know what any of the authors were who lived before our time, and are still objects of anxious inquiry, you have only to look into their works. But the dust and smoke and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality.”

On Personal Character

“… There is such a thing as an essential difference of character in different individuals. We do not change our features with our situations; neither do we change the capacities or inclinations which lurk beneath them.”

Public Opinion

“You do not go enough into society … You would there find many people of sense and information whose names you never heard of. It is not those who have made most noise in the world who are persons of the greatest general capacity. It is the making the most of a little … that brings men into notice. Individuals gain a reputation as they make a fortune, by application and by having set their minds upon it. … By setting the opinion of others at defiance, you lose your self-respect. It is of no use that you still say, that you will do what is right; your passions usurp the place of reason and whisper you, that whatever you are bent upon doing is right. You cannot put this deception on the public however, false or prejudiced their standard may be; and the opinion of the world, therefore, acts as a seasonable check upon wilfulness and eccentricity.”

On the Conduct of Life

“Do not be surprised … to find men talk exceedingly well on different subjects, who do not derive their information immediately from books. … common sense is not a monopoly, and experience and observation are sources of information open to the man of the world as well  as to the retired student.”

On Prejudice

“Prejudice is so far then an involuntary and stubborn association of ideas , of which we cannot assign the distinct grounds and origin; and the answer to the question, ‘How do we know whether the prejudice is true or false?’ depends … Whether the subject in dispute falls under the province of our own experience, feeling, and observation, or is referable to the head of authority, tradition, and fanciful conjecture? Our practical conclusions are in this respect generally right; … it is in trusting to others (who give themselves out for guides and doctors) that we are … at the mercy of quackery, impudence, and imposture. Any impression, however absurd, or however we may have imbibed it, by being repeated and indulged in, becomes an article of implicit and incorrigible belief. The point to consider is, how we have first taken it up, whether from ourselves or the arbitrary dictation of others.”

Unaltered Love & Perfect Love

“Perfect love has this advantage in it, that it leaves the possessor of it nothing farther to desire. … the soul finds absolute content, for which it seeks to live, or dares to die.”

“We could pass our lives in Oxford without having or wanting any other idea — that of the place is enough. We imbibe the air of thought; we stand in the presence of learning.”

On The Pleasure Of Hating

“We feel the full force of the spirit of hatred with all of them in turn. … we throw aside the trammels of civilization, the flimsy veil of humanity. … The wild beast resumes its sway within us, we feel like hunting animals, and as the hound starts in his sleep and rushes on the chase in fancy the heart rouses itself in its native lair, and utters a wild cry of joy, at being restored once more to freedom and lawless unrestrained impulses. Every one has his full swing, or goes to the Devil his own way. Here are no … long calculations of self-interest — the will takes its instant way to its object, as the mountain-torrent flings itself over the precipice: the greatest possible good of each individual consists in doing all the mischief he can to his neighbour.”

On The Qualifications Necessary To Success In Life

“Fortune does not always smile on merit … the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong … To be thought wise, it is for the most part only necessary to seem so; and the noisy demagogue is easily translated, by the popular voice, into the orator and patriot. …

Men are in numberless instances qualified for certain things, for no other reason than because they are qualified for nothing else. … a dull plodding fellow will often do better than one of a more mercurial and fiery cast – the mere unconsciousness of his own deficiencies, or of anything beyond what he himself can do, reconciles him to his mechanical progress, and enables him to perform all that lies in his power with labour and patience. By being content with mediocrity, he advances beyond it; whereas the man of greater taste or genius may be supposed to fling down his pen or pencil in despair, haunted with the idea of unattainable excellence, and ends in being nothing, because he cannot be everything at once.”

On The Want Of Money

“There are two classes of people that I have observed … – those who cannot keep their own money in their hands, and those who cannot keep their hands from other people’s. The first are always in want of money, though they do not know what they do with it. They muddle it away, without method or object, and without having anything to shew for it. … they hire two houses at a time … they purchase a library, and dispose of it when they  move house. With all this sieve-like economy, they can only afford a leg of mutton and a single bottle of wine, and are glad to get a lift in a common stage … they set no value upon money, and throw it away on any object or in any manner that first presents itself, merely to have it off their hands, so that you wonder what has become of it.”

On The Feeling of Immortality in Youth

“… so in the outset of life we see no end to our desires nor to the opportunities of gratifying them. We have as yet found no obstacle, no disposition to flag, and it seems that we can go on so for ever. We look round in a new world, full of life and motion, and ceaseless progress, and feel in ourselves all the vigour and spirit to keep pace with it, and do not foresee from any present signs how we shall be left behind in the race, decline into old age, and drop into the grave.”

On Disagreeable People

“Those people who are uncomfortable in themselves are disagreeable to others. … If we look about us, and ask who are the agreeable and disagreeable people in the world, we shall see that it does not so much depend on their virtues or vices – their understanding or stupidity – as on the degree of pleasure or pain they seem to feel in ordinary social  intercourse.

27.8 PROSE STYLE

Hazlitt has a very place in English literature. He wrote two kinds of essays- Miscellaneous essays and literary essays. In both varieties of essays, he is personal frankly giving his likes and dislikes. He has a very concrete, vivid, personal and vigorous style. Much of his work is journalism but because of its high standard many essayists cannot stand up to him. Unlike Lamb he is a vigorous writer who writes simple and unadorned prose. His prose is forceful, vigorous, gusty and clear. In his less ambitious essays he keeps a light, chatty stance of personal conversation. In his public lectures he adopts the sweep and eloquence of a practiced orator. Hazlitt is in the rank of writers like Bacon, Dryden, Earle, Addison and Swift. The influence on Hazlitt‟s style ranges from The Elizabethans, the Restoration writers, the writers of the eighteenth century and his contemporaries. He spoke in a conversational style with a thorough command and choice of words. He could discourse with ease, force and clarity setting aside all pedantic or oratorical sparks. He had no liking for long words and Latinized vocabulary. His writing is marked by an amazing vitality of thought and tartness of expression unequalled by even the great writers of English prose. He makes use of alliteration, antithesis,  metaphors, pun and epigrams. The metaphors do not crowd his style. They make his prose clear and bring a vivid liveliness that gives his prose vigour and grace. He is a master of aphoristic style and in this respect he comes closest to Bacon. He has a knack for using appropriate word at the appropriate place and his sentences can be elaborated upon as full essays. His pithy statements are unrivalled such as “common sense is tacit reason”, No young man believes he shall ever die”, “Life is the art of being well deceived”, “An author is bound to write – well or ill, wisely or foolishly: it is his trade”. He also uses parallel construction and contrast. He likes to join his subjects in pairs like “cant and hypocrisy”, “wit and humor”, “past and future”, “thought and action”, “genius and commonsense”, “patronage and puffing”, “writing and speaking” and many others. Hazlitt‟s prose has picturesque qualities. He quotes phrases and expressions from past writers like Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Wordsworth and others. He could use a word, phrase or a whole sentence. His essays reveal a few shortcomings. He makes changes to the use of expressions from other writers and rarely mentions the source. The words or phrases used appear natural in his writing. The word „gusto‟ is often used by him when he writes as a critic. His essays reflect his whimsical and shifting moods. His whims, resentment and moods come out on his abstract musings. He can be violent and sour tempered in his opinions and this very quality gives frankness, intensity, texture, shape and substance to his prose; they form a base for his digression which also becomes the topic of his essays. His egotism also comes out in the essays. The essays lack formal and systematic arrangement. There is plenty of thought but a lack of system of ideas in them.

27.9 HAZLITT AS AN ESSAYIST

Hazlitt‟s contribution as a man of letters is twofold. He developed the personal essay in his familiar style and also wrote as a critic. There is romantic element in his essays and he could write on a variety of subjects because of his diverse interests. He has written on literature, politics, sports and games, paintings, prize fighting, the stage, philosophy and religion. His essays reveal a combination of different characteristics of analysis, observation, interpretation, emotion, sentiment and idea. In both varieties of his essays he is frank and doesn‟t hesitate to give his personal opinion. He is guided not by set standards but by his own impressions. Every essay of Hazlitt is a fragment of autobiography and every sentence is like a confession. His writings hold scattered bits of his unplanned autobiography. His essays reflect his ego centrism as he believes that dramatists and novelists are committed to something bigger while the essayist is committed only to himself. He works through observation and impressions particularly made on emotions rather than through narrative and character analysis. He was a man of strong convictions and had the intellectual courage to express and expand upon his opinions. He has woven his experience of life and letters into the fabric of his essays. The essays are animated by his eager love and passion for all that is aesthetic, grand and heroic be it life, art, nature and character. He talks in his essays about his father, his prejudices, his love for painting, his enjoyment of walks, his literary taste, his love for nature and old books, his political leanings, his severe puritanical upbringing and his epicurean philosophy. His essays are famous for being racy, varied, vigorous and virile because they have so much to say. As a lover of nature he went far and wide to capture a fresh sensation and that could spice up his intellectual life. He starts his essays with a startling statement, a paradox or an epigram which immediately capture ones  attention. He even loves to write about his memories and recollections, things of the past. His essays show how much he tries to salvage and preserve the past and they become a web of linked associations, each colored by his feelings but spun from facts and things of present.

His essays are colored by his whimsicality and his shifting moods. He can be a hater of mankind at times and in the essays raves and rants at the world. But the bitterness reflected in the essays is short lived and goes on to show that it was just a transient phase. That is why he is accused of having no formal or systematic arrangement in his essays.

27.10 HAZLITT AS A CRITIC

As a critic he is just and judicious and his aim is nothing beyond analysis and judgment. He said: “to feel what is good, and give reasons for the faith in me”. He is the most eminent critic of his time. What sets him apart from his contemporary critics is his practical criticism aimed at only judging the writers and dramatists he had read. He was a romantic but free from the eccentricities and extravagances of romanticism. He was catholic in taste but also read Rousseau, whom he regarded as his intellectual mentor and poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge while side by side he also admired the writings of Fielding, Pope and Moliere. He was able to bring before us the beauties of expression of writers like Wordsworth, Milton and Shakespeare which no one had done before him. Hazlitt himself says-

“I have undertaken….. merely to read over a set of authors with the audience, as I would do with a friend, to point out a favorite passage, to explain an objection; or a remark or a theory as it occurs in an illustration of a subject; but neither tire him nor puzzle myself with pedantic rules and pragmatical formulas of criticism that can do good to anybody. I do not come to the task with a pair of compasses or ruler in my pocket to see whether a poem is square or round, or to  measure its mechanical dimensions, like a metre….. I have endeavored to feel what is good and  to give a reason for the faith that was in me, when necessary and when in my power.”

Hazlitt paid special attention to personal taste in the proper assessment of literature. He says that if he praised a writer it was because he liked him and if he quoted a passage it was because he was pleased to read it and he reluctantly spoke contemptuously of someone. He used the term poetry to mean three different things- “the composition produced, the state of mind or faculty producing it, and in certain cases, the subject matter proper to all forth that state of mind.” Poetry has the power to evoke fear, harmony, sense of beauty or power and hope and which each of us can feel alike. Imagination in poetry serves the purpose of wish fulfillment. Imagination helps one to escape the ugly and the hurtful things in life. Imagination adds something substantial to the objects of the real world. While it has the transforming power it seeks to imitate and reproduce nature. He was not of the view that only subjective poetry constitutes great art. He emphasized upon the objective treatment to mere subjective outburst of sentiments and feelings. Hazlitt considers poets to be all sympathizers, devoid of individuality and absorbed in his objects. Shakespeare he compares to a ventriloquist. For him Scott presents truth and nature while Byron thinks only of himself. He is aware of the relationship between history, literature and society. Though brutally frank and unsparing in his criticism he never wavered from the truth.

27.11 HIS CONTRIBUTION

Hazlitt contributed two types of essay writing- the personal and the critical. He gave a body of opinion on literature which was accepted by most critics. Critics felt his quotes had authority and he is read till today. Though he gave two extreme viewpoints but nevertheless he introduced the  reader to appreciation of good literature. Critics feel he is unequalled. He is praised by most critics who say that his style was appropriate to the subject under discussion unlike that of Johnson, Coleridge, Lamb or Bentham. Nobody could touch him in his criticism of literature. If he failed somewhere in his criticism it was because of his political leanings. He addressed innumerable qualities of writers that were ignored before him. Maugham recommended the reading of Hazlitt as a needed counter- influence to our commonplace journalistic prose, because Hazlitt is so “vivid, bracing and energetic”. He is said to have a permanent place in English Literature and permanent value to mankind. He wrote the most interesting pieces reflecting the vigor of his intellect in a style appropriate to the subject. His influence grew after his death and his opinions on art and literature bear influence on present time readings. His opinion about Keats against all contemporary criticism speaks of the “sureness of his judgment”. According to Geoffrey “he is not out of date, and can never become stale”.

• Hazlitt by Ralph M. Wardle University of Nebraska Press, 1971
• Selected Writings by William Hazlitt; Jon Cook Oxford University Press, 1991
• Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals, and the Metaphysics of Power by Uttara Natarajan Oxford University, 1998
• The Logic of Passion: The Literary Criticism of William Hazlitt by John L.
• MahoneyFordham University Press, 1981
• Hazlitt and the Real Language of Poetry by Natarajan, Uttara Philological Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 2, Spring 1996
• William Hazlitt, on Being Brilliant by Brock, Claire Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 44, No. 4, Winter 2005
• Imagination under Pressure, 1789-1832: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility by John Whale Cambridge University Press, 2000
• Literary Magazines and British Romanticism by Mark Parker Cambridge University Press, 2001
• Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Ideal Form by Natarajan, Uttara Philological Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 4, Fall 2002
• Rousseau, Robespierre, and English Romanticism by Gregory Dart Cambridge University Press, 1999
• Literary Theory and Criticism Festschrift Presented to René Wellek in Honor of His Eightieth Birthday

Tate Papers ISSN 1753-9854

‘Truth of Character from Truth of Feeling’: William Hazlitt, ‘Gusto’ and the Linguistic History of Writing on Art

Paul Tucker

Adapting and applying speech act theories of language use, this paper offers a new understanding of the innovative import of William Hazlitt’s art criticism. Textual and rhetorical analysis of a sample of his critical writing – the 1821 essay ‘On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin’ – illustrates Hazlitt’s development of ‘characterisation’, a mode of representation of the individual artwork focusing on its perceptual and affective appeal to a responsive viewer.

As a writer on art William Hazlitt has widely been recognised, for better and for worse, as a transitional, even pivotal figure. For example, in John Barrell’s estimation, Hazlitt aided the demise of the eighteenth-century ideal of ‘civic humanism’ by promoting a view of painting as privately and individually rather than publicly and collectively gratifying. 1 Stephen Bann, on the other hand, has stressed Hazlitt’s ‘startlingly contemporary’ concern with the ‘involvement of the body with its motor capacities and its perceptual skills, in the acts of painting and responding to painting’, and views him as ‘foreshadowing the “aesthetic criticism” of Ruskin, Pater and Stokes, and thus as the first critic to pose the distinctive issues which these unique commentators on the arts successively tried to explore’. 2 For Norman Bryson, again, ‘Hazlitt’s work on painting stands at [the] neglected watershed between Augustan and Romantic aesthetics’. 3 If his theory of the visual arts addressed ‘some of the most fundamental problems in aesthetics’ in a way that now seems ‘prophetic’, it was also firmly grounded in that of his immediate forebears. 4 ‘Hazlitt’s work,’ Bryson has argued, ‘is the essential bridge-passage where one can hear the themes of Enlightenment aesthetics suddenly transform into new configurations, to emerge finally as the new Romantic music. And without this bridge-passage the transformation will seem mysterious, a radical discontinuity or paradigmatic break, when it is really only a question of neglect and omission.’ 5 Just such a break was posited nearly fifty years ago by Robert Stange, for whom Hazlitt, with Charles Lamb, could ‘be said to have made later art criticism possible by challenging traditional ideas about the relations between painting and literature, and thereby extending the possibilities of prose expression’. 6 By ‘art criticism’ Stange understood a ‘writer’s attempt to give a prose account of the aesthetic values and affective qualities of a work of visual art’. 7 Art criticism in this precise sense was, he averred, ‘a new genre’, one inaugurated by Hazlitt and Lamb, though in a climate prepared by the aesthetic theories of Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel. Stange presented its development as instantiating a more general and ‘radical change in the nature and function of … expository prose’, from ‘cognitive’ to ‘expressionist’. 8 More recently, Richard Read has analysed the ‘sensuous particularity of Hazlitt’s ekphrases’ as ‘a gateway both to the massively enlarged domain of external appearances that Ruskin explored in his defence of Turner’s art from the 1840s onwards, and the equally enlarged subjective world that Pater opened for aesthetic reverie from the 1870s’. 9 And lastly,  Tom Nichols has emphasised the decisive importance of Hazlitt’s contribution to the critical reception of Titian in Britain:

He pioneered a new historical phase in the understanding of colore , celebrating it as conjoined to the ongoing sensual life of the individual spectator. He was among the first to ‘privatise’ Titian’s colorito , to emphasise its communicative and personalising effects. His kind of intimate appreciation can be seen as a prototype for the aesthetic, avant-garde and modernist-inflected accounts of Titian’s painting that were to follow. 10

The present paper aims to consolidate, supplement and even in part reconcile the foregoing observations by considering Hazlitt’s writing on art from a specifically linguistic and textual point of view and thereby assessing his role as innovator in a manner at once exact and comprehensive: the analytical method here outlined permits detailed comparison between writings on art of any genre and period, in so far as it focuses on those passages in which individual works of art or collections of works are verbally represented. Particular attention will be paid to the relation between Hazlitt’s critical and theoretical writings in this field, especially the essay in which he expounds his concept of ‘gusto’, a concept which Stanley Chase long ago recognised as representing for this writer ‘the crowning quality of great art’. 11 That relation has been somewhat neglected. In her discussion of Hazlitt’s aesthetic, Elisabeth Schneider is concerned with ‘the philosophical basis of his criticism’ but not directly with the criticism itself. 12 And looking ‘to find a historical context’ for his theoretical ‘pronouncements on art’, Bryson declared Hazlitt’s aesthetic ‘perhaps the most vivid illustration we have of Gusto ’, himself, however, overlooking the more concrete exemplifications of the theory offered by the critical writings. 13 In Bann’s essay too Hazlitt’s ‘practical criticism’ is not allowed to engage fully with his theory, and in particular with what Bann deemed the ‘unsatisfactory concept of “gusto”’. 14 ‘Hazlitt’s great strength’, he insisted, lies less in any prescriptive ambition à la Reynolds than ‘in his capacity to mobilise the resources of a highly coloured, deceptively colloquial prose style in order to convey a vivid impression of the paintings which he values’. 15

This paper aims to show not only what the precise resources are that Hazlitt mobilises, but how and why he does so, and in special reference to his theoretical pronouncements. Linguistically and textually motivated answers to these questions must, it is held, not only clarify Hazlitt’s individual aims and achievements as a writer but also enhance understanding of the broader cultural developments in which he has been seen to be so prominent an actor: the ‘radical change in the nature and function of … expository prose’ posited by Stange; the drift towards subjectivism regretted by Barrell; but also the deliberate ‘confusion of the arts’ and ensuing ‘suggestiveness’ of nineteenth-century literature, diagnosed at the beginning of the last century by Irving Babbitt; 16 or, again, the novel strategies enumerated by Robert Schweik as deployed by nineteenth-century writers on art with the aim of ‘bringing images to life’: ‘situating the picture in the flow of time’; ‘conferring action and sound on pictures’ and ‘dramatising the viewer’s response’. 17

A ‘descant upon’ Poussin’s Blind Orion

For reasons of space and in view of the variously emblematical significance accorded a portion of it by Stange, Bann and others – most conspicuously by Tom Paulin 18 – this article will focus on the essay ‘On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin’, first published (over the initial ‘T’) in the London Magazine of August 1821 as the eleventh in a series of essays bearing the general title ‘Table Talk’. 19

Bann concludes his paper on Hazlitt’s art criticism by quoting and commenting on part of the initial passage devoted to Blind Orion in Search of the Rising Sun 1658 (fig.1), the ‘landscape’ of the essay’s title:

He is represented setting out on his journey, with men on his shoulders to guide him, a bow in his hand, and Diana in the clouds greeting him. He stalks along, a giant upon earth, and reels and falters in his gait, as if just awaked out of sleep, or uncertain of his way;––you see his blindness, though his back is turned. Mists rise around him, and veil the sides of the green forests; earth is dank and fresh with dews[.] 20

Fig.1 Nicolas Poussin Blind Orion in Search of the Rising Sun 1658 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Fletcher Fund 1924 

For Bann, Hazlitt’s text counts as his ‘most original, and yet in some ways most traditional essay on painting’: ‘traditional,’ he explains, ‘because in some ways it reads like an extended ekphrasis in the classical mode, and original because it associates the effect of the work with a primary fantasy, an anamnesis of original nature which seems to be suspended between Platonism and psychoanalysis’. 21 Finding Hazlitt’s central critical concept of ‘gusto’ to adumbrate the ‘notion of synaesthesia’, Bann deems it ‘exactly appropriate, for his most lengthy essay on a single painting, Hazlitt should have chosen the subject of a blind man, since immediately he is able to deny the regime of visuality and associate the viewer’s pleasure with the bodily movements of Orion through the awakening landscape’. 22

Stange fixes on substantially the same passage as an ‘excellent’ example of Hazlitt’s attempts to ‘render in words what he calls “the true and general impression” of a work of art’. 23 He omits the first sentence in the extract given by Bann and he quoted Hazlitt’s text at slightly greater length, as follows:

earth is dank and fresh with dews, the ‘grey dawn and the Pleiades before him dance,’ and in the distance are seen the blue hills and sullen ocean. Nothing was ever more finely conceived or done. It breathes the spirit of the morning; its moisture, its repose, its obscurity, waiting the miracle of light to kindle it into smiles: the whole is, like the principal figure in it, ‘a forerunner of the dawn.’ 24

Stange then comments:

Much of the force of Hazlitt’s ‘impression’ depends on breaking through the widely accepted Lessing-ite views as to the limitations of the visual arts. He ascribes, for example, movement to the painted figure of Orion and to the landscape: mists rise, dawn and stars dance in the painting. And, even more significantly, the effects of one medium of sense impression are transposed to another. Hazlitt’s description is, like the work of Schlegel’s ‘poetic critic’, an independent evocation of feeling; he uses expressive epithets of original poetic description (the ocean, for example, is sullen ), and reinforces the iconographic significance of Poussin’s painting by elaborating on and extending its mythological allusions. One would not say that Hazlitt had written an ‘Überpoussin’, but he has at least manipulated diction and metaphor to produce in the reader a complex sensory response which is equivalent to the impression Poussin’s painting might make. 25

Paulin, for his part, believes it ‘impossible to overstate the importance’ of Hazlitt’s account of Poussin’s painting, which constitutes the principal portion of ‘the finest opening paragraph in the history of criticism, a paragraph so long and carefully moulded, so epic in its momentum, that it’s like a concentrated essay in itself’. 26 In Paulin’s view, ‘Hazlitt’s whole life is packed into’ this paragraph, analysis of whose complex intertextuality permits us to ‘glimpse the deep structure of his critical imagination’. 27

None of these accounts is entirely satisfactory, in so far as each somehow isolates the passage in question from the text of which it is an integral part. Bann, for instance, implies that Hazlitt’s essay is devoted in toto to Blind Orion , but crucially this is not the case, as the next section shows. Stange equally neglects the rest of Hazlitt’s text. And Paulin, for whom the essay is ‘more than a piece of art criticism’, indeed rather an ‘elegy’ for Keats and Napoleon ‘and for the [republican] values he shared with them’, additionally considers only the remainder of its first and its final paragraphs. Further, although Bann’s generic likening of the passage on Blind Orion to ‘ ekphrasis in the classic mode’ is a salutary reminder that the different ways in which a work of visual art may be verbally represented are limited in number, being determined by the work’s fundamental ontology and phenomenology, and for this reason archaic also, it may be asked whether there does exist any single ‘classic mode’ of ekphrasis. The generic comparison blots out the historical facts of synchronic and diachronic variation in the actual combination and development – for changing communicative purposes – of those ontologically and phenomenologically determined modes of representation.

Again, if, as Stange asserts, Hazlitt’s text does ‘break through’ Lessing-ite commonplaces about the disparity of verbal and visual regimes, it does not dispense with them altogether but endorses while it challenges them. Words perform an indispensable task here in both confirming the non-verbal status of the visual and enhancing its reception through evocation of concerted affective and perceptual witness. And although Stange points to significant features of Hazlitt’s text, he partly misrepresents and misapprehends them. For one thing, dawn and stars do not ‘dance in the painting’ but in the fragment from Paradise Lost interpolated by Hazlitt, which is not directly a representation of anything in the work. 28 Secondly, verbal ascription of movement to a depicted figure is quite standard if that figure is depicted as in movement, and was certainly no novelty in 1821, as any number of ekphrases from classical antiquity will show. 29

Rather than the ascription of movement as such (or, as Schweik phrases it, the ‘conferring action … on pictures’), what is remarkable in Hazlitt’s text is the ascription of movement through insistent selection of verbs encoding manner: ‘He stalks along, a giant upon earth, and reels and falters in his gait’ (my emphases). 30 Again, it is not the ascription of rising movement to the depicted mists which is striking so much as the way the relevant clause – ‘mists rise around him’ – manipulates the verbal representation of space. What cognitive linguists term the ‘frame of reference’ would seem to be of the ‘relative’ type here: the spatial relation between the object to be located (the mists) and the object serving as a reference point (‘him’, i.e. Orion) is specified ‘with respect to the viewer’s own bodily orientation and location’. 31 On this reading the preposition ‘around’ would indicate circumscription of the giant on an imaginary plane fronting the viewer. However, ‘around’ also seems to demand a deictic interpretation, as evoking the more-than-visual sense of space radiating from the blind Orion himself. The subjective agency and intentionality evoked in the emphatic sequence of manner-of-motion verbs seems to invest the preposition, which thereby evokes a spatial consciousness experientially centred in the wayfaring giant. While necessarily retaining his/her own vantage point the viewer is impelled as it were to share that spatial consciousness.

The succeeding clause – ‘and veil the sides of the green forests’ – further complicates the spatiality of this verbal representation. While it too deploys a relative frame of reference, this is conflated with another type, termed ‘intrinsic’ in that it ‘relies on a prior assignment of “intrinsic” or inherent parts and facets to objects’. 32 Thus, the mists ‘veil the … forests’ in as much as they interpose themselves between the trees and the viewer’s eye. Yet, by transference to the road traversing the forests, the term ‘sides’ again suggests quasi-deictic identification with the wayfaring giant. In addition, ‘sides’ construes the forests as multifaceted bodies with natural orientation, whose spatial autonomy detaches the viewer from the depicted scene. Subsequently, however, identification with a subject of extra-visual sensory experience in direct bodily contact with the viewed landscape is once more induced by the tactile predicates in the clause ‘earth is dank and fresh with dews’, even as the absence of a definite article before ‘earth’ (for the second time in the text) abstracts this noun’s meaning away from the local and corporeal and once more returns the viewer to his/her external viewpoint. Like the use of the quotation from Milton in one of its functions, this last generalising and distancing effect foregrounds the overall significance of the painting as a landscape or, as is subsequently specified in the text, as a representation of morning in nature. 33 And this prepares the way for its verbal representation in the sequel as a depiction of original or primordial morning (Bann’s ‘primary fantasy’):

The same atmosphere tinges and imbues every object, the same dull light ‘shadowy sets off’ the face of nature: one feeling of vastness, of strangeness, and of primeval forms pervades the painter’s canvas, and we are thrown back upon the first integrity of things. 34

The ambiguities of spatial representation just analysed, with their effect of alternate, if not concurrent projection of the viewer within and disengagement from the depicted scene, are some of the linguistic resources enabling Hazlitt to ‘associate the viewer’s pleasure with the bodily movements of Orion through the awakening landscape’. 35 They also imply Hazlitt’s recognition and manipulation of the crucial role to which (as David Carrier has pointed out) the image itself calls the viewer. 36 Such manipulation may be explained in such a way as to illuminate not only the ‘notion of synaesthesia’ or Hazlitt’s private sense of the significance of Poussin’s landscape painting, but, more generally, writing on art as such. But this involves seeing it as an integral part of the thematic and rhetorical economy of Hazlitt’s text as a whole.

Extending the analysis: thematic structure and genre

Paulin analyses Hazlitt’s essay as an aggregate of quotations and intertextual links but neglected its thematic, hence too its overt argument structure. 37 Thematically, ‘On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin’ is organised as a sequence of passages each devoted to a specific topic. The structure is summarised in the table given in the appendix , the first column listing the topics that define the constituent passages and the third the subsidiary topics introduced to support the major statements (second column; see below) by way of comparison or exemplification.

The passage specifically devoted to Poussin’s painting (Ib) is prefaced by an account of the mythological figure of Orion (Ia). The semantic link between passages Ia and Ib is metonymical in character: the figure of Orion is ‘the subject of this landscape’. And some form of metonymy governs the relations between all the passages. Passage Ib is followed by others devoted to Poussin, the painter of Blind Orion (II and IV), and to the landscape genre to which Hazlitt assigns this work (III). The concluding passages (V and VI) discuss the pleasures afforded by a ‘life passed among pictures’ and by ‘collections’ of pictures, in particular the innovative occasional exhibitions of Old Master paintings organised since 1815 by the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom. As Hazlitt himself explains, the link here is that Blind Orion was included in a collection of paintings on display at the Institution’s gallery on Pall Mall at the time of the essay’s publication. 38

This fact is somewhat obliquely conveyed by Hazlitt, however:

The Orion, which I have here taken occasion to descant upon, is one of a collection of excellent pictures, as this collection is itself one of a series from the old masters, which have for some years back embrowned the walls of the British Gallery, and enriched the public eye. 39

That the occasion to ‘descant upon’ the painting was offered Hazlitt by its current exhibition on Pall Mall is communicated in so indirect and marginal a fashion as to raise the question of the genre(s) to which this specimen of ‘Table Talk’ may be said to belong. And in this regard it is interesting to consider what may be gleaned from Hazlitt’s published correspondence as to the circumstances in which the essay was written and published. Letters dated 9 and 22 June 1821 addressed to the new proprietors of the London Magazine , John Taylor and James Hessey, respectively promise and apologise for having failed to produce an ‘article’ on ‘the British Gallery’. 40 Hazlitt apparently refers to the ‘Critical Notice of the Paintings in the British Institution’ announced in ‘The Lion’s Head’ editorial section of the June issue of the magazine as due to appear there the following month. 41 It seems, then, that he had been commissioned to write a review of the Institution’s summer exhibition. This would have complemented the April issue’s unsigned review of the foregoing spring show, which Duncan Wu considers to combine text by Thomas Griffiths Wainewright with additions or adjustments made by Hazlitt, then standing in as editor of the London Magazine . 42 That ‘On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin’, announced in July and published the following month, may in a sense have replaced the review Hazlitt had been unable to deliver is strongly suggested by the structure of the essay. 43 This effectively inverts and substantially transforms standard modes of organising exhibition critiques in the periodical press, modes which had been established, in reference to the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy, in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Mark Hallett has outlined the ‘limited number of forms’ assumed by the new genre:

Typically, they began with an introductory paragraph or two discussing the show’s overall quality, and what this suggested about the state of British art more generally. One of several directions might then be pursued. Certain writers, for instance, would focus in detail on examples of the most prestigious pictorial genres – history paintings and grand portraits – before providing shorter discussions of a selection of more modest works. Alternatively, and far more commonly, there would be an initial concentration on the most prominent exhibitors, whose works would be dealt with as a group, before pieces by secondary masters would enter into consideration. From the mid-1780s onwards, we also find other critics regularly proceeding in yet another fashion, in which they discuss the exhibition in catalogue order … This method of review, even when made up of short fragments of commentary, could be made to extend over many issues of the newspaper. 44

Early nineteenth-century periodical reviews of the exhibitions of the British Institution follow and further develop this set of patterns. For example, critiques of the Institution’s summer exhibition of 1821 printed in the Morning Post and Examiner begin by affirming the uniform excellence of and high ‘degree of enjoyment’ afforded by it. 45 They proceed to justify these initial assertions by instancing, respectively, the individual paintings displayed, presented as so many proofs of the pictorial merits typical of the various national schools, and the artists represented, whose characteristic qualities or choice of subjects are encapsulated in a series of epithets and nominal expressions. A significant example of more detailed commentary on a selection of paintings is offered by the Catalogue Raisonnee [ sic ] of the Pictures in the Late Exhibition of the British Institution , published anonymously in a run of issues of the Morning Chronicle between late September 1815 and mid-January of the following year, and now thought to be the work of the Royal Academician Robert Smirke. The Catalogue Raisonnee was a satirical enumeration of ‘the particular pieces and the several qualities for which it is supposed the Directors more immediately made the selection’ exhibited in the summer of 1815. 46 And, with its sequel of the following year, it was the object of Hazlitt’s indignation and scorn in a series of three articles written for the Examiner . 47

‘On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin’ concludes with an overall assessment of the Institution’s current exhibition, of a type that might have prefaced a conventional review of it. 48 This assessment is rather more general in scope, however, in so far as it addresses the rationale and value of the new kind of public exhibition of which this was an example (a kind in fervent support of which Hazlitt had written at much greater length in his attack on the Catalogue Raisonnee ). 49 Furthermore, the passage on Blind Orion and its mythological prelude do not initiate a series of commentaries on individual exhibits. Rather, as becomes apparent to the reader in retrospective overview, they establish the first of those subsidiary topics, statements concerning which serve to validate a set of general statements regarding Poussin as a landscape painter and what might be called the metaphysics of landscape painting. Yet in the economy of Hazlitt’s discourse Blind Orion is effectively promoted from the status of subsidiary to that of primary topic (one of those topics informing and defining its constituent passages and thus determining its primary content). The painting’s verbal representation is assigned the functionally crucial opening position, where it acts as liminary emblem of the philosophy of art expounded in the body of the essay. And this allows the painting itself to be instanced within the essay as epitome and allegory of Poussin’s landscape painting and as a standard of aesthetic value.

What this structural revision amounts to is a ‘viewing experience’ new in mode and quality and at the same time (and by the same token) a new instrument and object of rhetorical validation. Prepared perhaps by decades of exhibition critiques written ‘for consumption beyond the Academy’s walls’, the ‘viewing experience’ offered the reader in or through the essay is removed from actual observation or illustration, being addressed to the mind through the medium of language. 50 Considered indeed as an ‘alternative’ account of the British Institution’s summer exhibition closely focused on a single exhibit, ‘On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin’ dissociates itself from the kind of exhibition critique practised by a fellow-contributor to the London Magazine , Thomas Wainewright. According to David Stewart, ‘Wainewright’s digressive style exemplifies the nature of viewing in the modern metropolis. When not talking to an imagined friend, he is talking to his dog, to his editor, or, most commonly, to his reader: consuming art, he recognises, is a social activity, and the effect this has on criticism is significant.’ 51 As one of the ‘best examples’ of what Wainewright himself called his ‘“chitty-chatty and off-hand” method’, Stewart cites the review of the Institution’s spring exhibition mentioned above:

He notices painting after painting, pausing at some, dashing past others … The pace is frenetic, and he stops only when he runs out of space … What he offers is not criticism of the exhibition, but an account of the experience of attending it. No work exists in itself, but is seen as part of a show: Jackson is ‘next to’ Landseer, and Wainewright’s account of the exhibition is linear only in the sense that it records what he sees in the order that he sees it. This is breathless, spectacular commentary, unlikely to leave much in the memory but a sense of exhilaration: and it is wholly appropriate to the type of exhibition he is commenting on. 52

Hazlitt’s essay, by contrast, abstracts from the experience of the exhibition as ‘social spectacle’ with a view to constructing and reviewing ‘a gallery in the mind’. 53 Here is a ‘privatising’ development of the kind deplored by Barrell, one already noted with disapproval in a review of Sketches of Some of the Principal Picture Galleries in England in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1824. Instead of ‘rich stores of information’ the reviewer finds the book to abound in general ‘reflections’, its few descriptions ‘overloaded with the spirit of Essay writing, a practice too common among Authors of the present day’. 54 ‘As essays,’ he concedes, ‘they are tolerably well written, and as such, are adapted to pass away an idle hour in the closet; but as guides they will never be of much utility.’ 55 Yet what mental abstraction and linguistic mediation actually yield here is an acutely enhanced sense of a particular painting’s expressive power and presence. And the validating statements the essay deploys are graphic and persuasive to the extent that they support more general statements articulating a novel sense and understanding of paintings as impelling sources of expression.

This can be demonstrated through analysis of the semantic and pragmatic relations subsisting between the essay’s primary and subsidiary topics. And this in turn entails consideration of the various kinds of statement combined and coordinated in expounding those topics. Since it is hardly possible here to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the essay, what follows will also concentrate on the passage representing Blind Orion , the subsidiary topic accorded special prominence by Hazlitt, but in such a way as to show how this passage validates assessments of Poussin as a landscape painter in the immediate sequel.

Assertion and argument

First, though, what kinds of statements is it possible to deploy? In studying the language of art writing I have developed an expanded version of speech act theory, which distinguishes more thoroughly than heretofore between representational and interactional varieties of assertion, in other words between varieties of assertion that may be differentiated from one another with reference to the what rather than the how of assertion – to the propositional content expressed rather than to the mode of interpersonal engagement adopted. 56

This expanded version of speech act theory has been inductively developed through the empirical analysis of text and has led to the recognition of seven possible varieties of assertion used to represent objects (where objects is used in the broadest sense possible): identifying; classifying; describing; evaluating; characterising; comparing-to; and interpreting. For our immediate purpose it will be necessary to distinguish carefully four of these. Thus, to describe an object is to represent it in terms of what renders it perceptually distinct and of the spatial relations ordering its proper articulation and defining its co-location (in space or time) with other objects. To evaluate an object is to represent it in terms of worth or merit, as satisfying or failing to satisfy a standard of sufficiency relating to a given criterion of value. To characterise an object is to represent it (on the model of human character) in terms of manifest interiority, perceptual gestalt, or overall sensuous or emotive ‘appeal’ to the viewer. And lastly, to interpret an object is to represent it in terms of the objects for which it stands or to which it points in a symbolic or signifying relation.

Assertive propositions are coordinated at a ‘higher’ level of discourse by means of a set of rhetorical relations. These, however, remain unrealised in the text, except for occasional slight signals in the grammar, lexis and punctuation. Of the nine so far identified, elaboration, expansion and explanation coordinate propositions by evoking connections between the states of affairs they represent. Of these three, one in particular will concern us here. Thus, a proposition elaborates on another by sharpening the reference of, or by qualifying an object represented in it. The remaining six – complementation, justification, endorsement, modification, correction and countering – correlate propositions as phases in an argument. Once more, definitions are given only for those actually applied in the following analysis of Hazlitt’s text. Thus, a proposition complements another when the situation it represents relates to that represented in the first as its rational concomitant or corollary (x so y). On the other hand, a proposition justifies another when it is offered in support of the claim made in the first (x for the reason that y).

The whole of the passage devoted to Blind Orion is quoted above, but in segments. It is now given here in its entirety, with the clauses or groups of clauses numbered for ease of reference:

[1a] He is represented setting out on his journey, [1b] with men on his shoulders to guide him, a bow in his hand, and Diana in the clouds greeting him. [2a] He stalks along, a giant upon earth, and reels and falters in his gait, [2b] as if just awaked out of sleep, or uncertain of his way; [2c] ––you see his blindness, though his back is turned. [3a] Mists rise around him, and veil the sides of the green forests; [3b] earth is dank and fresh with dews, the ‘grey dawn and the Pleiades before him dance,’ [3c] and in the distance are seen the blue hills and sullen ocean. [4] Nothing was ever more finely conceived or done. [5a] It breathes the spirit of the morning; its moisture, its repose, its obscurity, waiting the miracle of light to kindle it into smiles: [5b] the whole is, like the principal figure in it, ‘a forerunner of the dawn.’ [6a] The same atmosphere tinges and imbues every object, the same dull light ‘shadowy sets off’ the face of nature: [6b] one feeling of vastness, of strangeness, and of primeval forms pervades the painter’s canvas, [6c] and we are thrown back upon the first integrity of things. 57

A literally central feature of this portion of text is [4], which stands out structurally as constituting its only simple (one-clause) sentence and rhetorically as expressing its only evaluative proposition. The section preceding [4] comprises representations of two elements in the depicted scene: the figure of Orion ([1]–[2]) and the landscape through which he moves ([3]). In the section following [4], on the other hand, the painting is represented comprehensively and specifically as a landscape. In a conventional exhibition review some such evaluation as is expressed in [4] might have functioned as the motivating or conclusive assertion in a picture commentary and might accordingly have been placed in initial or final position. [4], by contrast, is centrally placed and generically formulated (‘conceived’ and especially ‘done’ hardly manage to specify a scale of value on which the painting establishes a standard of sufficiency). Nor does it realise the principal claim of this passage: its function is to complement the assertions expressed in [1]–[3] and to trigger justification , duly supplied in [5] and [6]. The principal claim arrives where it might be expected, at the very end of the passage: clause [6c] is the climax to which the passage moves and it complements [5], [6a] and [6b] by interpreting the painting as signifying original, metaphysical wholeness.

If we now look at the sections either side of [4] and consider how these prepare the pivotal evaluation and the culminating interpretation respectively, it will be apparent how much of the representational and rhetorical work here is performed by characterisation. An initial interpretation of the subject in [1a], supplemented by descriptive specifications in [1b], gives way in [2a] to characterisation of Orion’s peculiar ‘gait’ through intensive use of manner-of-motion verbs, as already noted. The imaginatively entertained explanations introduced by ‘as if’ in [2b] exemplify the empathically inferential response to appearance and behaviour which is intrinsic to characterisation and which is ‘dramatised’ (as Schweik puts it) through the use of the second person in [2c]. It is the viewer’s expressly attested capacity to intuit character that motivates the already analysed manipulations of spatiality and interchange of extra-visual sensory experience in [3a] and [3b].

[5] and [6] in their turn contain many lexical signals of characterisation: figurative evocation of infusive vitality (‘it breathes the spirit of the morning’) and overt inscriptions of affectivity, totality and self-identity (‘the whole’; ‘The same … the same’; ‘one feeling’) and of manifest inherent and impalpably diffuse quality (‘The same atmosphere tinges and imbues’). Indeed, the aspects of an object selected for characterisation are what in Husserlian phenomenology are termed its ‘moments’, parts that are materially or notionally inseparable from it as a whole, as opposed to its discrete, potentially or actually independent and themselves divisible ‘pieces’. 58 Unlike pieces, moments elude spatial delimitation and discrimination, the special province of description. A propos of characterisation’s typical concern with ‘moments’ and Hazlitt’s own predilection for characterisation, one may again instance an illuminating if hostile comment by an anonymous reviewer writing in the British Review of May 1819:

Mr. Hazlitt is fond of conveying an idea of characteristic excellencies or defects by a single stroke of the pen. A few instances of his particular talent in this way will explain our meaning. The interest of Hamlet is ‘reflex;’ that of Cymbeline is ‘aerial.’ The characteristic of Chaucer is ‘intensity;’ that of Spenser, ‘remoteness;’ Eve is ‘all ivory and gold;’ Juliet ‘voluptuous and glowing.’ 59

In deploring such ‘unmeaning’ locutions, the writer has unsympathetically and no doubt unwittingly highlighted a distinctive trait of characterisation, which is to individuate an object by means of a summary expression ascriptive of what is here termed an object’s ‘characteristic’, an intrinsic and defining, thus comprehensive or generally pervasive quality – an expression of a kind that might be thought of as tacitly prefaced by the formula ‘in a word’. Indeed, what we have here are minimal examples of what a century and a half later and in a critical climate wholly dominated by characterisation, Roberto Longhi, a propos of art criticism in particular, would commend under the label schedula poetico-critica . 60

To move on to the function played by Hazlitt’s representation of Blind Orion within the essay as a whole, the interpretation in [6c] is complemented by the first in a series of statements, almost all characterisations, regarding more general topics ( see the central column of the table in the appendix ): ‘[7a] This great and learned man might be said to see nature through the glass of time: [7b] he alone has a right to be considered as the painter of classical antiquity.’ 61 This dual statement regards Poussin’s overall achievement as a painter, and in particular as a painter of nature and of history. Rather than an individual painting, [7a] characterises Poussin’s entire oeuvre. It is complemented by the (implicitly evaluative) classification in [7b], which hyperbolically nominates Poussin sole representative of his class (‘ the painter of classical antiquity’ [my emphasis]). Other generalising characterisations punctuate the remainder of the essay. Together with [7a] and [7b] these form its rhetorical backbone, giving rise to numerous justificatory arguments and instantiations. The next characterisation in this series regards a still more general topic – ‘the historic painter’ – and complements one whose immediate subject is rather the achievement of any artist of the stature of Poussin (or of his poetic counterpart, Milton): ‘There is nothing in this “more than natural,” if criticism could be persuaded to think so. The historic painter does not neglect or contravene nature, but follows her more closely up into her fantastic heights, or hidden recesses.’ 62 The last of these structurally principal statements is also dual and again regards Poussin’s individual achievement taken in its entirety, although this time as a painter tout court : ‘Poussin was, of all painters, the most poetical. He was the painter of ideas.’ 63

Character and ‘gusto’

The speech act here named characterisation is a resource integral to human speech. As already indicated, its primary function is to represent the ways in which personal character manifests itself. It presupposes the tendency in persons to act and behave in ways indicative of coherent and consistent patterns of thought, affect and judgement, as it presupposes the capacity in speakers to recognise and respond to such patterns. Its primary objects are what the philosopher Thomas Reid called the ‘natural signs’ of ‘the thoughts, purposes, and dispositions of the mind’ legible in ‘the features of the face, the modulations of the voice, and the motion and attitude of the body’. 64

Reid claimed that ‘the fine arts are all founded upon this connection, which we may call the natural language of mankind ’. 65 He presumably alluded to the capacity of art to imitate the signs of this language as they naturally occur, a capacity which has since ancient times given rise to commentary featuring a form of fictive characterisation, the verbal representation of pictorial or sculptural imitations of natural signs treated as though they were real. 66 Another (somewhat less archaic) application of characterisation in discourse on visual art is a corollary of understanding particular works as products of individual imagination and artifice. Under this conception, characterisation represents a work as if itself a ‘natural sign’ of its creator, an extended form of personal behaviour and expression. This is the rationale informing the long history of the Italian term maniera, already in use in the fourteenth century with reference to a painter’s personal style of technical execution. 67

There are several reasons why Hazlitt’s use of characterisation in ‘On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin’ marks a decidedly modern phase in the resource’s history. First, it is not specifically technical in focus, and it is evidently dependent on, while it reinterprets, the early modern academic tradition of pictorial genres. Furthermore, in addition to individual works or groups of works, treated as manifestations of the personal style of the painter or of the class of artist he represents, the objects characterised include depictions of animate and inanimate entities, despite the native incapacity of the latter to manifest ‘the natural language of mankind’: ‘Even inanimate and dumb things speak a language of their own. His snakes, the messengers of fate, are inspired with human intellect. His trees grow and expand their leaves in the air, glad of the rain, proud of the sun, awake to the winds of heaven.’ 68 It is by this mode of characterisation especially that Hazlitt construes the peculiar expressive unity and metaphysical resonance of Poussin’s landscapes:

In Nicholas Poussin … every thing seems to have a distinct understanding with the artist: ‘the very stones prate of their whereabouts:’ each object has its part and place assigned, and is in a sort of compact with the rest of the picture. It is this conscious keeping, and, as it were, internal design, that gives their peculiar character to the works of our artist. 69

Again, late eighteenth-century reviewers of public exhibitions had availed themselves of characterisation for purposes of (negative) evaluation, whereby a form of satirical representation served to denigrate a pictorial performance. Consider, for example, this passage on Benjamin West’s Christ Coming Up Out of the Jorda n  (Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery), extracted from A Liberal Critique on the Exhibition of the Royal Academy (1794) by Anthony Pasquin: 

The waters of Jordan were certainly of a singular nature, if the splashings of this hallowed stream are conveyed by the pencil with aquatic justness. They have the green hue of a stagnate pool, and not the liquid transparency of a limpid brook. The figure of Christ looks like a deserter, who had been recently whipped, and was sneaking off to a surgeon, with a blanket over his wounds. 70

As a reviewer of exhibitions Hazlitt too deployed this (ultimately) evaluative tactic. In 1814 he had written of another painting by West, ‘ Lot and his Family is one of those finished specimens of metallurgy which too often proceed from the President’s hardware manufactory’. 71 And of Washington Allston’s picture of Diana Bathing 1812 he had asserted, ‘The knowledge of the human figure in this pleasing composition might be opposed with advantage to the utter ignorance of it in some Musidora sketches, in which the limbs seem to have been kneaded in paste, and are thrown together like a bundle of drapery’. 72 In ‘On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin’, on the other hand, characterisation functions independently of evaluation and it functions determinatively: it dominates the rhetorical structure at the level of claim and justification. It thus signals a critical stage in the gradual eclipse of evaluation in the course of the nineteenth century and in the concomitant reconceptualisation of the work of art as, first and foremost, an epiphany of ‘inner’ quality and coherence. Lastly, it is the final object of characterisation in its broadest sense – the ‘ internal design’ of persons and things intuited by responsive viewers – which informs Hazlitt’s closing evocation of the transfigurative potency of pictures (‘the bright consummate essences of things’), as it also constitutes the doctrine at the essay’s theoretical and philosophical core. 73

Hazlitt does not distinctly name object or doctrine in this essay. He does, though, elsewhere, by means of the term ‘gusto’. 74 And what makes Hazlitt so conspicuous and remarkable a figure in the rise to prominence of characterisation in writing on art is that his elaboration of this concept brought the rationale informing the resource into a degree at least of theoretical focus.

Hazlitt’s ‘gusto’ has commonly been glossed in terms of ‘intensity’ and of ‘synaesthesia’. Bryson, for instance, like Bann, equates ‘gusto’ with synaesthesia and defines its role in Hazlitt’s writing on art as ‘a central criterion of value’. 75 Wu, on the other hand, explains the term as ‘an index of the imaginative intensity with which the artist endows his work’. 76 Denise Gigante implicitly combines these two meanings, explaining that ‘Gusto was a critical term for Hazlitt to indicate a kind of full-bodied aesthetic experience, ripe with sensual enjoyment’, 77 while Chase more explicitly correlates them:

To use a less fantastic word, we might say, I think, that Hazlitt means simply ‘intensity’, with the corollary that in painting this intensity results in the excitation of more senses than that to which the primary appeal is made. Sensations of smell, of taste, or of hearing are mingled with those of sight, and the complexity of these sensations intensifies our emotional reaction, since more of our functions enter into it. 78

These accounts are incomplete in so far as they overlook the ontological and phenomenological thrust of the concept. What ‘gusto’ names is primarily – or ultimately – a quality of individual objects, especially as revealed through visual representation and as this representation is explicated in verbal commentary. ‘Gusto’ entails intensity and synaesthesia in every phase or aspect of the objects’ phenomenology – perception, representation, reception and explication – in as much as the quality it intends, though visually manifest, or rendered such through representation in art, eludes sight and conceptualisation in terms largely fitted to visual perception, demanding affective engagement and indirect or fictive construal, through recourse to metaphor and simile. ‘Gusto’ is that ‘new interest unborrowed from the eye’ for which Hazlitt commended a landscape of Richard Wilson’s in 1814. 79

The ontological point of Hazlitt’s concept is highlighted in his principal definition of it, in the corresponding term, in the opening sentence of the essay ‘On Gusto’ (1816): ‘Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object’. 80 The essay goes on to specify that the province of ‘gusto’ includes not only things possessing expression – things capable of ‘natural signs’ – but also ‘things without expression’, for instance ‘the natural appearances of objects, as mere colour or form’. 81 However, under evident pressure of semantic extension the distinction is immediately blurred: Hazlitt stresses that ‘In one sense … there is hardly any object entirely devoid of expression, without some character of power belonging to it, some precise association with pleasure or pain’. The purpose of ‘gusto’, at all events, is to achieve object-defining ‘truth of character from the truth of feeling’. 82 It aims to reveal to perception what in ‘The Indian Jugglers’ (1821) and in reference to ‘the objects of fine art’ Hazlitt terms ‘inner structure’, to make such structure perceptually manifest with the assistance of ‘taste and imagination’. 83 It aims to exhibit and interpret the ‘natural language’ of objects as objects of human experience. In ‘The Indian Jugglers’ again Hazlitt writes that ‘Objects, like words, have a meaning; and the true artist is the interpreter of this language, which he can only do by knowing its application to a thousand other objects in a thousand other situations’. 84 Here is the reason (to return to ‘On Gusto’) why ‘gusto in painting is where the impression made on one sense excites by affinity those of another’. 85

Where does Hazlitt’s concept come from? The noun ‘gusto’ is of course a loan from the Italian for ‘taste’ and covers many of the senses conveyed by its original, including those in which ‘gusto’ functions as a synonym for artistic maniera and in which it signifies aesthetic discrimination and refinement. 86 Those senses occur in Italian from the mid-sixteenth century, becoming much more common by the mid-seventeenth. 87 The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following definitions of ‘gusto’, with usages for each dating from the early to mid-seventeenth century (with the exception of the last, of which the earliest example is dated 1713):

1. Individual or particular liking, relish, or fondness … 2. Keen relish or enjoyment displayed in speech or action … 3. Art . Style in which a work of art is executed; artistic style; occas . prevailing or fashionable style in matters of taste. Often with qualification as great (= It. gran gusto ), high , noble … †4. Aesthetic appreciation or perception. Obs . rare … †5. Flavour or savour (of food, etc.). Obs . rare [.] 88

Of Hazlitt’s ‘gusto’ (‘one of his most interesting and elusive critical concepts’) Bann remarks, ‘It is not, as far as I know, taken from any established critical vocabulary’. 89 In a pertinent comparison with Hazlitt’s use of the term ‘character’ Joel Haefner distinguishes his use of ‘gusto’ from Joshua Reynolds’s use of the Italian expression gusto grande . 90 The reference is to Reynolds’s third Discourse, where he instances diverse names for those ‘excellencies in the art of painting beyond what is commonly called the imitation of nature’:

The Moderns are not less convinced than the Ancients of this superior power existing in the art; nor less sensible of its effects. Every language has adopted terms expressive of this excellence. The gusto grande of the Italians, the beau idéal of the French, and the great style , genius , and taste among the English, are but different appellations of the same thing. 91

Earlier uses in English of this purportedly Italian expression occur in writings by John Durant Breval, John Macky and, perhaps most significantly, Joseph Addison. 92 In all of these it is largely applied to architecture. This may in part explain why, though it occurs in the writings of Reynolds’s contemporary (and detractor), Anton Raphael Mengs, 93 it is not found in any of the chief Italian treatises on painting or collections of artists’ (principally painters’) lives of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Giorgio Vasari’s Vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori e scultori (1550, 1568), Raffaelle Borghini’s Il riposo (1585), Giovan Pietro Bellori’s Vite de’ pittori, scultori e architecti moderni (1672) and Filippo Baldinucci’s Vocabolario toscano dell’arte del disegno (1681) and Notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua (1681–1728). It does appear in the  Dizionario portatile delle belle Arti (1781), but this is a translation of the Dictionnaire portatif des beaux-arts by Jacques Lacombe (1752) and gusto grande is here a calque of the French ( grand goût ). 94 Indeed, it seems likely that (like the Oxford English Dictionary ’s ‘ gran gusto ’, an expression in which gran can only function as an intensifier and signify a high degree of taste), gusto grande is a sort of inter-linguistic illusion. 95 Perhaps it was intended to Italianise the Anglo-Italian expression ‘ grand Gusto ’ used by John Savage to translate grand goût in his English version of Roger De Piles’s Abrégé de la vie des peintres (1699). 96 This lexical hybrid at any rate enjoyed considerable success over the next century. It merited an entry of its own in the second volume of John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum (1710), a précis of Savage’s translation of the relevant passage in De Piles. 97 And this entry was itself replicated (except for the tell-tale citation of the French cognate goût ) in Chambers’s Cyclopoedia (1728) and (with definitive dropping of the definite article in front of ‘ grand Gusto ’) in the Encylopoedia Britannica and Encyclopoedia Perthensis . 98

Chase’s second definition of Hazlitt’s ‘gusto’ as ‘the condition of grandeur in art’ is therefore misleading. 99 In Hazlitt’s use the term has little to do with the ‘grand style’ or ‘the sublime’ (although M.H. Abrams stressed its derivation from ‘the Longinian emphasis on critical responsiveness and “enthrallment”’). 100 Nor does it designate the fictive organ of aesthetic discernment, appetite or pleasure – meanings largely belonging to the province of evaluation – or the distinctive style of an artist. Hazlitt’s sense of ‘gusto in art’ seems to appropriate ordinary, non-aesthetic and literally gustatory uses of the loan and to privilege the more objective over the more subjective interpretations of which it is susceptible. It thus incorporates something of the Oxford English Dictionary ’s second (characterising rather than evaluative) meaning: ‘Keen relish or enjoyment displayed in speech or action’. It also foregrounds the obsolete fifth meaning – ‘Flavour or savour (of food, etc.)’ – which for Samuel Johnson was primary. 101 Although the British Review ’s hostile critic, cited above, was unable to see its relevance, Hazlitt figuratively extends this objective meaning to the experiential ‘flavour’ of things, their affective potency as objects of experience, intuited and embodied by ‘power and passion’ effecting and registering transfiguration in art. 102

Hazlitt must not have been unconcerned with the way in which this quality is construed in language. 103 Certainly, his use and explication of the term ‘gusto’ – his supposition, for instance, that the quality it denotes has the capacity figuratively to sting the mind – highlight two major hallmarks of characterisation as a mode of representing inanimate objects in speech: fictivity as such and, more particularly, the non-veridical representation of extra-visual sensory experience. 104 This indeed explains the recurrent recourse to synaesthetic effects in his criticism of works of visual art, such as the evocation of ‘dank’ earth in the Blind Orion passage analysed above and the singing of the wind, the rustling branches and the twanging of bows in Titian’s The Death of Actaeon c.1559–75 (National Gallery, London) which forms part of ‘On Gusto’:

Again, Titian’s landscapes have a prodigious gusto, both in the colouring and forms. We shall never forget one that we saw many years ago in the Orleans Gallery of Acteon hunting. It had a brown, mellow, autumnal look. The sky was of the colour of stone. The winds seemed to sing through the rustling branches of the trees, and already you might hear the twanging of bows resound through the tangled mazes of the wood. 105

Hazlitt’s ‘gusto’ names that general property of objects, especially of works of visual art, whose construal in speech entails the selection and representation of parts or aspects (‘moments’) integral to their perceptual and aesthetic character and which determine their ‘look’ or unique manner of engaging the viewer. 106 Indeed, the presence in this passage of the noun ‘look’ – like that of the verb ‘seem’, with its implicit evocation of the viewer’s crucial responsive role – is an unequivocal index of characterisation.

In conclusion, Hazlitt cannot ‘be said to have made later art criticism possible’, but his theory of ‘gusto’ and his practical illustration of the concept in his criticism are important symptoms of a macroscopic process underway in Western culture between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whereby the resources available to speakers for the discursive representation of works of art were subject to re-ordering or re-orientation through the foregrounding and intensification of characterisation. As has already in part been suggested by Stephen Bann and Tom Nichols, in elaborating on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of maniera , manner, style, taste and indeed gusto, Hazlitt’s use of the latter term is seen to be a significant forebear of later theoretical formulations of character in art: the ‘piercing pholas-like mind’s tongue, that works and tastes into the very rock heart’ of Ruskin’s penetrative imagination, 107 the ‘illusion of varying muscular sensations inside [the] palm and fingers’ communicated by Bernhard Berenson’s tactile values, 108 the absorbing presence of Walter Benjamin’s ‘aura’, 109 the ‘empathic, identificatory pull’ exerted through Adrian Stokes’s ‘incantatory process’ or ‘invitation in art’, 110 and the ‘variously oblique or tropical’ forms of ‘indefinite description’ demanded by the ‘visual character’ or ‘interest’ favoured (and judiciously left undefined) by Michael Baxandall. 111

The Hazlitt Society

• Bibliography
• Critical Approaches
• Book Reviews

A Select Hazlitt Bibliography

P. P. Howe (ed.), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt . 21 vols. London: Dent, 1930-4. (Centenary edition)

This is still the standard edition for anyone seriously interested in Hazlitt. It contains texts of all the full-length volumes now attributed to him, and Howe's annotations are still helpful (although they're keyed to outdated editions, and contain some errors). The likelihood is that if you have access to this, it will probably be through a library. If you wish to acquire a complete set, you'll find that its price hasn't declined with time: on the second-hand market, it's not unknown for copies to sell for £2000. There were only 1000 copies in the original edition, although it was reprinted in the 1960s by Cass & Co, and it is now also accessible  in facisimile on archive.org . It has to be said that Howe's edition isn't quite 'complete'; there are a number of essays that he doesn't include here, and the type is quite small. If what you need is a good selected works that includes most of the book-length texts, see the next entry. Duncan Wu (ed.), The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt . 9 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998.

This nine-volume edition updates Howe's texts, and his annotations, incorporating the scholarship of the seven decades since the appearance of Howe. Along with newly-edited texts of the major book-length works, it includes two hitherto unpublished essays (edited from manuscript). It also includes an important introductory essay by Tom Paulin.

Duncan Wu (ed.), New Writings of William Hazlitt . 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ( OUP website ).

This is a collection of 205 newly-discovered essays by Hazlitt, including major essays on the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, a defence of Byron and Shelley from accusations of indecency, an analysis of the three trials of the Regency publisher and writer William Hone, and a series of reminiscences and anecdotes from his last years. Some of Wu's attributions are speculative, but largely convincing.

Jon Cook (ed.), William Hazlitt: Selected Writings . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. (World's Classics paperback: OUP website. )

This is an excellent one-volume paperback selection, which divides its contents under subject headings such as 'Politics', 'Culture', 'The Self', 'Heroes', and 'Art and Literature'. Cook provides a useful introduction, and helpful annotations.

Jon Mee and James Grande (eds.),  The Spirit of Controversy and Other Essays . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. (World's Classics paperback: OUP website )

Updated World's Classic which focuses more on the essays and the context of their first publication within the print culture of the Romantic period.

Tom Paulin and David Chandler (eds.), William Hazlitt: The Fight and Other Writings . London: Penguin Classics, 1998. ( Penguin Classics website )

Another excellent one-volume selection, significantly longer and more inclusive than either World's Classic, with an introduction by Tom Paulin and some informative annotations by Chandler.

Gregory Dart (ed.),  William Hazlitt: Metropolitan Writings . Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2005. ( Carcanet website )

This volume collects together a number of Hazlitt's most important metropolitan essays, many of them not otherwise available in paperback. These essays include 'On Londoners and Country People', 'The Indian Jugglers', 'On the Want of Money' and 'On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth'. The edition also contains a critical introduction exploring Hazlitt's attitude to early nineteenth-century London life.  

Gregory Dart (ed.),  Liber Amoris and Related Writings . Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2008. ( Carcanet website )

This edition brings together Liber Amoris , Hazlitt's notorious memoir of unrequited love, and some of the other essays that he was producing at the same time (1821-3). These include important pieces 'On the Fear of Death', 'On Great and Little Things', 'The Fight' and 'On the Knowledge of Character'. Prefaced by a critical essay and containing footnotes relating Hazlitt's texts to his letters from the period, this edition offers a detailed insight into the main creative crisis of Hazlitt's life

Duncan Wu (ed.), The Plain Speaker: The Key Essays . With an introduction by Tom Paulin. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.  ( Blackwell (now Wiley) website )

Excellent paperback selection from one of Hazlitt's most important works. Includes such important works as 'On the Prose Style of Poets', 'On the Conversation of Authors', 'On Reason and Imagination', and 'On the Pleasure of Hating'. In addition it contains John Hamilton Reynolds' hitherto unpublished description of Hazlitt and a newly-discovered essay, 'A Half-Length'.

William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age . Grasmere: The Wordsworth Trust, 2004.

This appears to be the only paperback edition of Hazlitt's greatest work currently in print. It is lavishly illustrated with portraits of the various people described by Hazlitt, and is prefaced with an essay by Robert Woof, director of the Wordsworth Trust.

William Hazlitt

AMONG English essayists William Hazlitt is distinguished for his psychological revelations. Less companionable than Steele, less erudite than De Quincey, without Addison’s classic culture and Leigh Hunt’s bonhomie, he is more introspective than any one of these. The speculative exceeds the literary element in his equipment. To think rather than to learn was his prevalent tendency; intuition rather than acquisition was his resource. The cast of his mind, the quality of his temperament, and the nature of his experience combined to make him thoughtful, individual, and earnest; more abstract than social, more intent than discursive, more original than accomplished, he contributed ideas instead of fantasies, and vindicated opinions instead of tastes. Zest was his inspiration ; that intellectual pleasure which comes from idiosyncrasies, moods, convictions, he both felt and imparted in a rare degree ; he thirsted for truth ; he was jealous of his independence ; he was a devotee of freedom. In him the animal and intellectual were delicately fused. Few such voluminous writers have been such limited readers. Keenly alive to political abuses, bred in the atmosphere of dissent, prone to follow out his mental instincts with little regard to precedent or prosperity, there was a singular consistency of purpose in his career. Undisciplined by academic training, his mind was developed by a process of reflection, both patient and comprehensive ; and so much was it to him a kingdom, that only the pressure of necessity or the encouragement of opportunity would have won him from vagrant musing to elaborate expression. He looked within for the materials of his essays, — drawing upon reason and consciousness, outward influences being the occasions rather than the source of his discourse. So far as he was a practical writer he was a reformer, and, as a critic, he wrote from æsthetic insight, and not in accordance with any conventional standard. Accordingly, while excelled in fancy, rhetoric, and fulness of knowledge by many of his class, he is one of the most suggestive ; he may amuse less, but he makes us think more, and puts us on a track of free and acute speculation or subtle intellectual sympathy. He makes life interesting by hinting its latent significance ; he reveals the mysterious charm of character by analyzing its elemental traits ; he revives our sense of truth and defines the peculiarities of genius ; and to him progress, justice, and liberty seem more of personal concern from this very perception of the divine possibilities of free development. His defects and misfortunes confirmed these tendencies. A more complete education would probably have weakened his power as a writer; more extensive social experience, less privation and persecution, would have bred intellectual ease, and higher birth and fortune modified the emphasis of his opinions. But, thrown so early upon his own resources, left to his wayward impulses, and taught to think for himself, he garnered in solitude the thoughts which circumstances afterwards elicited, and had the time and the freedom to attain certain fixed views and realize his own special endowments by experiment. His earliest tendency was metaphysical, his most congenial aptitude artistic. The spontaneous exercise of his devouring intelligence was in the sphere of abstract truth ; the fondest desire of his youth was to be a painter; and from these two facts in the history of his mind, we can easily infer all his merits as an essayist: for while, on the one hand, he brings every subject to the test of consciousness, on the other, his sensuous love of beauty and curious delight in its study give, at once, a philosophical and a sympathetic charm to his lucubrations, in which consists their special attraction. It was disappointment in his ambition to become an artist that renewed his speculative vein, and the necessity of making this more winsome to the public that made him a popular author. The details of such a career and the traits of such a character are worthy of study; and the volume of Leigh Hunt already cited is a grateful evidence of intellectual obligation, the sources of which we shall endeavor to indicate as they are revealed in the life and writings of William Hazlitt.

Bostonians of the liberal school, who visited England in the early days of packet-ships, must have felt disappointed at the obscure and unenviable position of the scattered representatives of their faith there. Accustomed to associate superiority with everything English, from cloth and cutlery to books and scholars, and leaving a community where culture and competence were identified with Unitarianism, the small, bare chapels and isolated labors of the most intellectual class of dissenters in Britain doubtless proved a painful surprise. The contrast they offered to the luxury and ostentation of the Established Religion deepened this impression. And yet, with this despised minority originated much of the humane and independent thinking which has brightened and beautified our civilization. Political justice and religious toleration upheld and illustrated by earnest and courageous minds, whose crusade was sanctioned by rare personal worth and frugal probity, found by degrees that popular recognition which now makes principles once persecuted as dangerous the salubrious leaven in the inert mass of traditional wrong and deadening superstition. In such a school, unendowed by the state, unheralded by titles, unrecognized by the great world, William Hazlitt was born and bred.

John Hazlitt, an Irish Protestant, emigrated from the county of Antrim to the neighborhood of Tipperary, and there established himself as a flax factor ; his son William graduated at Glasgow in 1761, joined the Unitarians, and crossed over to England, where, for many years, in various rural places, he was settled over small congregations. He was a man of unimpeachable integrity, of learning and piety, but destitute of ambition ; simple in his tastes, of frugal and studious habits, and a remarkably modest and contented disposition. The aspect under which he was best remembered by his children was “ poring over old folios,” and watching with pleasure the growth of his vegetable-garden. He was a beautiful type of the English pastor as delineated by Goldsmith, with the difference that to a scholar’s habits and a good man’s peaceful benignity he added a vivid sympathy for the advancement and welfare of his race, and a keen interest in philosophic inquiries. Accordingly, despite a small salary and frequent clerical migrations, he sustained casual relations with the foremost thinkers of his day ; he was a warm friend to our country during the Revolutionary War, and of essential service to the American prisoners at Kinsale, near where he was then living. He knew Franklin, and was a friend and correspondent of Priestley and Price. He married Grace Loftus, a farmer’s daughter of decided personal charms and attractive qualities of character. He had three children, — John, who became a distinguished artist, Peggy, and William, the youngest the subject of this notice, who was born in Mitre Lane, Maidstone, April 10, 1778. Two years after the family removed to Ireland, where the elder Hazlitt took charge of a parish at Bandon in the county of Cork ; and, at the close of the war in which he had taken so deep an interest, and when his son William was five years old, they visited America.

In May, 1783, the Hazlitts arrived in New York, and soon after went to Philadelphia. The New Jersey Assembly being in session at Burlington, Mr. Hazlitt, by invitation, preached before them; and during the fifteen months he remained in Philadelphia frequently addressed congregations, and also delivered a course of lectures on the Evidences of Christianity. He then made a brief visit to Boston, where he founded the first Unitarian Church. His son, the artist, left in the New World several fruits of his pencil, in the shape of portraits ; and the earliest likeness of his brother William was executed here, and represents a handsome bright boy of six, with blue eyes, and long, curly brown hair. The latter’s recollections, however, did not extend to this early period; the memories of childhood were associated with Wem in Shropshire, where his father established himself on his return from America, in 1786-87, and remained until his death. It was here in the neighborhood of Salisbury, in a humble parsonage, that the boyhood and youth of the future essayist was passed ; and he fondly reverts to the walks, talks, reading, and musing which consecrated this region to his memory. Two or three letters written at eight and ten years of age, to his father when temporarily absent, give an inkling of the mature character of his mind, and his innate disposition to moralize and speculate. “ I shall never forget,” he writes, “ that we came to America. I think, for my part, it would have been a great deal better if the white people had not found it out.” At ten he tells his brother, in a serious epistle, “we cannot be happy without being employed. I want to learn how to measure the stars.” And again he informs his father of his manner of passing his time while on a visit to London: “ I spent a very agreeable day yesterday, as I read sixteen pages of Priestley. On Sunday we went to church, the first time I ever was in one, and I do not care if I never go into one again. The clergyman, after he had gabbled over half a dozen prayers, began his sermon, which had neither head nor tail. I was sorry so much time should be thrown away on nonsense.” Here we recognize the embryo critic and reformer; and that his spirit of free inquiry and independent faith was encouraged by the good pastor down in Shropshire is evident from the paternal replies to these frank and filial letters. “ The piety your letter displayed,” writes Hazlitt père , “was a great refreshment to me ; nothing can truly satisfy us but the acquisition of knowledge and virtue.” In 1791, at the age of thirteen, Hazlitt may be said to have begun his crusade in behalf of justice and freedom. His young heart swelled with indignation at the outrages perpetrated in Benningham upon Priestley, because of his obnoxious opinions ; and he boldly entered the field against those who attempted to excuse, if not to justify, the destruction of the liberal philosopher’s house by a mob. This juvenile protest was published in the Shrewsbury Chronicle. But Hazlitt dates his conscious mental awakening a year later; when fourteen years old, coming out of church, he heard an earnest discussion between his father and an old lady, in regard to the corporation and test acts and the limits of religious toleration. He was inspired by what he heard to “ frame a system of political rights and general jurisprudence ” ; and many years afterwards, when engaged in the advocacy of his principles of liberal reform, he alludes to this incident in the Preface to his “ Project for a New Theory of Civil and Criminal Legislation,” to show that his convictions on the subject were not accidental and recent, but instructive and long considered. “It was,” he wrote, “the first time I ever attempted to think ; it was from an original bias, a craving to be satisfied of the reason of things.”

This reminiscence gives the keynote to Hazlitt’s intellectual character. When placed at Hackney to be educated with a view to the ministry, he neglected the prescribed theme, and gave, as an excuse, that he had been occupied with another subject, namely, an Essay on Laws ; so novel a course won him encouragement to write on the Political State of Man, and to meditate a treatise on Providence ; and these youthful speculations bore fruit in after years, when his work on “Human Actions” appeared, — to the last his pride, and confessedly able and original, but never successful in the ordinary sense of the term. These abstract experiments soon received human inspiration, when Coleridge made his appearance at the Wem parsonage ; this was an epoch in Hazlitt’s life from which he dates a new relish of existence, and a revelation of the infinite possibilities of intellectual activity and enjoyment. The description he wrote, long after, of his talks and walks with Coleridge, of his visit to him at Nether Stowey, of the sermon he rose before day and plodded ten miles through the mud to hear him preach, is vital with an almost rapturous sense of sympathy, admiration, and delight. He lamented he was not a poet, in order to apostrophize the road between Wem and Shrewsbury, along which he listened to the mystic and musical utterance of the most richly endowed and eloquently suggestive being he had ever known. His gratification was complete when Coleridge recognized a metaphysical discovery in his young votary’s conversation. One would almost believe that, with the new ideas and vivid fancies imparted by this remarkable man, Hazlitt had imbibed somewhat of his procrastinating, discursive, dolce for niente tendency ; for the luxury of thinking beguiled him from active enterprise and seemed to extinguish ambition, until it took a new direction, and painting usurped the place of philosophy.

From childhood Hazlitt had been familiar with the process and principle of the painter’s art through his brother’s prosperous activity therein ; it was at his house that he lived during the frequent visits he made to London ; between that and the Wem parsonage his early years were passed ; but he does not seem to have attained any sympathetic appreciation of the art until a view of the treasures at Burleigh House, in 1795, awakened all his latent enthusiasm for the old masters. He tried his hand, from time to time, until he had such command of the pencil as to receive a commission to copy some of the famous pictures in the Louvre, just then enriched by the trophies of Napoleon’s victories in Italy. This visit to Paris was, perhaps, the most charming episode of his life, certainly of his youth. The impressions then received, the tastes then and there confirmed, became permanent. Day after day, for a few happy weeks, he worked assiduously in the peerless galleries, reproducing with rare fidelity many of the finest traits of the originals, over which he lingered with intense admiration ; he made copies of two or three masterpieces of Titian, of some of Raphael’s best heads, and several studies for his own benefit ; he developed a remarkable facility in seizing the general effect and working out the expressive details, so that his “style of getting on ” was noticed, with encouraging commendation, by French writers and his own countrymen. For the first time his application was regular and productive, his mind tranquilly occupied, his pride and pleasure earnestly identified with his vocation. He dreamed, in after years, of this heyday of his youth ; he remembered the works then on the walls of the Louvre with unabated delight ; the knowledge and love of art then acquired became thenceforth an inspiration. He cherished two or three of his copies with the attachment of an enthusiast, not so much for their merit as their associations. Returning to England, Hazlitt made a professional tour in the provinces and executed numerous portraits ; among others, those of Hartley Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his own father, — the latter a labor of love both to artist and sitter; and a likeness, said to be his last, of Charles Lamb in the costume of a Venetian orator. But his standard was high ; and he was too honest a critic not to estimate justly his own attempts in a sphere with whose grandest exemplars he was fondly intimate ; accordingly the failure to realize his ideal, the want of correspondence between his executive power and his clear and high conceptions, discouraged him profoundly. Candid friends agreed with him in recognizing certain defects in his portraits, and (with what pain we may infer from his eloquent essay on the “ Pleasures of Painting,” and “ A Portrait by Vandyke,”) he decisively relinquished the pursuit he so loved. Whether patience and perseverance would have overcome his difficulties it is impossible to say ; Northcote always declared he abandoned the experiment too soon, and would have made a great painter. But few of his works exist that are not seriously injured by magilp ; there are enough, however, in the possession of his descendants, in a sufficiently good condition to enable us to perceive how much of the true feeling and the natural skill in art he possessed, and to lament, for his own sake, that he had not awhile longer clung to the pencil and palette. It is said that he was “ very impatient when he could not produce the designed effect, and has been known to cut the canvas to ribbons.” Few Britons have shown a deeper love of art. “ If I could produce a head like Rembrandt in a year,” he says, “ it would be glory and felicity and wealth and fame enough for me.” The discipline and delight of this brief but fervent dalliance with art were, notwithstanding, of permanent advantage ; thereby he came better to understand the “ laws of a production,” the worth of beauty, the elements of character ; his perception was quickened, his insight deepened, and his powers, as observer and analyst, enlarged. It was during this vivid Paris experience that he learned to admire Napoleon the First, to have faith in his star, to believe in his mission as that of political regeneration, and to glory in his genius, — a feeling so prevalent and pervasive, that when his hero’s fortunes waned Hazlitt suffered in health and spirits, as from a personal calamity.

Reverting, after the life of a painter was denied him, to his original proclivity, he finished and published, in 1804, his essay on the “Principles of Human Action,” which, while it gained him the high opinion of a few thinkers, was profitless both to author and publisher. His next venture was a kind of digest, with comments, of a series of articles which Coleridge had contributed to the Morning Post, and which excited Hazlitt’s political vein ; the pamphlet entitled “ Free Thoughts on Public Affairs” had but a limited sale ; it was followed by a select compilation from the speeches of British statesmen, with notes,—a desirable and useful work, but one which did not add to his means ; a more congenial and elaborate literary task was an abridgment of “Tucker’s Light of Nature” ; and one which elicited his logical acuteness and was the first to impress the critics of the day with his acumen and scope as a thinker, chiefly because it related to a subject of immediate interest, is his “ Reply to Malthus.” Thus far authorship, as a resource, had proved no more satisfactory than painting ; and for some time Hazlitt appears to have reposed, not upon his laurels, which were yet to be won, but upon his sensations and ideas, wherein he found no inadequate compensation for the want of a successful career. Indeed, with a certain competence, he would have been content, as he declared, “ to live to think,” though it soon became apparent that he must “think to live.” Meantime, however, he enjoyed his immunity from stated employment ; like all genuine literary men, as distinguished from scholars and the professional tribe, he had the instinct of freedom and vagabondage, delighted in yielding to moods instead of rules, and fancies instead of formulas; he could walk about Wem in spring and autumn, he could see first-rate acting, he could observe “the harmless comedy of life,” he could solve metaphysical problems, follow, in imagination, the campaigns of the great Corsican, chat with an artist or poet, lie in bed in the morning, sup with original characters at the coffee-house, and, in short, be William Hazlitt.

A peculiar and valuable social resource had also intervened which must have insensibly attuned his mind to a more genial species of literary work, as well as given scope and impulse to his expressive faculty. He had become intimate with Charles Lamb ; with him and his few but choice friends he discussed the merits of old authors, speculated on subjects connected with the mysteries of life, and the humors of character, and the singularities of taste ; the drama was a favorite recreation, conversation an unfailing pastime. “ Charles and Hazlitt are going to Sadler’s Wells,” writes Mary Lamb, in the summer of 1806 ; and the former was Elia’s companion on the memorable occasion he has so quaintly described, when his play was damned. The same correspondence lets us into the secret that a certain liking had developed between Hazlitt and Sarah Stoddart, an intimate companion of the Lambs, who seems to have vibrated, for some time, between three or four “ followers,” — lovers they can hardly be called, as, judging from the tone of her friend’s letters, the young lady, if not exactly a coquette, was somewhat undecided and variable as to her conjugal views. It appears that she finally came back to Hazlitt, but whether the hesitation was owing to her or him is not clear. That the union was brought about by circumstances rather than passion is evident from the one half-playful and wholly tranquil letter from her future husband which has been preserved. Miss Stoddart appears to have been better read than the average of Englishwomen of her class ; she was remarkably candid and independent, wherein we imagine lay her chief attraction for Hazlitt, who was impatient of conventionalities and a lover of truth. She had an income of a hundred and fifty pounds, and owned a little house at Winterslow ; her brother was ceremonious and exacting, and perhaps his fastidiousness had interfered with her previous settlement. The pair were ill assorted, for she was not expert in household duties, and he did not find the sympathy he needed ; but things went smoothly enough at first, for he liked the domestic retirement of the country, and had time enough there to cogitate and ramble. “ I was at Hazlitt’s marriage,” Lamb writes to Southey, August 9, 1815, “and had liked to have been turned out several times. Anything awful makes me laugh,” —a reference to the event more characteristic than satisfactory. Mrs. Hazlitt, we afterwards discover, was of the “ free-and-easy ” style of woman, hated etiquette, and had no taste in dress. Evidently the withdrawal of the pair to their rural home was a privation to Lamb. He missed the companionship of Hazlitt. The delightful “ Wednesday evenings ” of which we have so many pleasant glimpses lost not a little of their charm. “ Phillips makes his jokes,” says Mary Lamb, writing to Mrs. Hazlitt, “and there is no one to applaud him ; Rickman argues, and there is no one to oppose him. The worst miss of all is that, when we are in the dismals, there is no hope of relief in any quarter. Hazlitt was most brilliant, most ornamental as a Wednesday man ; but he was a more useful one on common days, when he dropped in after a quarrel or a fit of the glooms.” After many delays and frequent disappointments, Lamb and his sister paid a visit to the Hazlitts, which was not only a rare pleasure, but became a fond reminiscence ; they walked over the country around Winterslow, when Nature was in her fairest array ; renewed their old free, fanciful, and argumentative intercourse, and gained health and spirits by the change of air, the “ mutton-feasts,” and agreeable exercise. It was during this visit that Lamb explored “ Oxford in Vacation,” of which experience he afterwards wrote so winsome an account. Soon after their return a letter from their hostess mentioned what promised to be a lucrative discovery on Hazlitt’s premises, — that of a well, where wells were much needed and seldom found ; the anticipation proved fallacious ; but while the delusion lasted, Hazlitt used to hide near the precious spring to overhear the talk of his neighbors on the subject, and “ it happened occasionally,” we are told, “ that the eavesdropping metaphysician found the germ of some subtle chain of thought in the unsophisticated chit-chat of these Arcadians.” He also read Hobbes, Berkeley, Priestley, Locke, Paley, and other philosophic writers, with deliberate zeal, and wrote the outline of an English Grammar subsequently published by Godwin. The birth of a son made it indispensable for him to increase his wife’s little income, and he went up to London to live by his pen. His equipment for this career was unique ; he had thought much, read little, and his only practice in writing had been of a kind the reverse of popular. His first place of residence was in York Street, Westminster; the house, according to tradition, had once been occupied by Milton, and was owned by, and overlooked the garden of, Jeremy Bentham. Hazlitt soon began to turn to account his favorite studies. He procured an engagement to deliver before the Russell Institution a course of lectures on the English Philosophers and Metaphysicians. He next undertook the parliamentary reports for the Morning Chronicle, and soon after was engaged in the more congenial work of theatrical critic of the Courier. Thus in 1814 he had fairly embarked in the precarious career of a writer for the London journals.

Thenceforth, as long as he lived, we find him engaged, with occasional recreative intervals and episodes of travel or illness, in contributing to reviews, weekly literary journals, and monthly magazines, and, from time to time, gathering these critical, reminiscent, and æsthetic papers into volumes. It is a method having singular advantages for a mind like his, discursive, fluctuating in glow with mood and health, active in relation to vital questions of social and civic reform, and at the same time prone to bask in the mellow light of the past and to concentrate upon themes of recondite speculation. From a prolonged and continuous task a man so constituted often shrinks ; his inspiration is not to be controlled by will ; he must write as he feels ; and in a brief but keen effort is more efficient than in prolonged labor. Gradually the animation of town-life and the encouragement of candid discussion diversified his scope and enriched his vocabulary. The habit of frequent and familiar communication with the public made his style incisive and colloquial ; he emerged betimes from the abstract into humane generalizations ; as reporter of debates and stage critic he learned to express himself with force and facility ; and when the “ Round-Table ” department of the Examiner was dedicated to essays on life, manners, and books, he and his friends Lamb and Hunt revived with fresh and individual grace and insight the kind of writing so congenial to British taste, which had been memorably initiated by Steele and Addison. He wrote on art in the “ Champion,” and was soon enlisted by Jeffrey as an Edinburgh Reviewer ; his first article was a kind of critical digest of the British novelists, à propos of a review of Dunlap’s “History of Fiction,” and Madame D’Arblay’s “ Wanderer ” ; then came papers on Sismondi’s “ Literature of the South of Europe,” and Schegel’s “ Lectures on Shakespeare.” The Examiner made him acquainted with the Hunts, for whose short-lived serial, the “ Yellow Dwarf,” he wrote fifteen articles. These labors of the pen alternated with courses of lectures delivered before the Surrey Institution, at Glasgow and elsewhere, on such subjects as the “Comic Writers,” “The English Poets,” etc.

And now ensued, or rather there had long accompanied, his literary career that base system of persecution whereby the government organs of Great Britain so disgracefully sought to baffle and mortify writers of genius in the realm whose political creed was obnoxious. If ever the history of opinion is written by a philosophical annalist, the details of this brutal interference with the natural development of free thought and honest conviction will be recorded as one of the most shameful anomalies of modern civilization. Hazlitt experienced all the reckless abuse incident then and there to an author who ventured to combine literary with political disquisition, unawed by power and unmoved by scorn. When his “ Characters of Shakespeare,” collected from the Chronicle, were published, the work was hailed by readers of critical taste and national pride with delight ; the first edition was sold in a few weeks, republished in America, and a new one printed, when the book was attacked by the Quarterly Review—a periodical “set up by the ministers,” as Southey acknowledged, established by the agents of the government for the express purpose of putting down liberal writers — in terms so unjust and malignant that the sycophantic herd ignored it, with genuine English obtuseness, as the work of a Bonapartist, a radical, an incendiary, and cockney scribbler. Hazlitt wrote an indignant letter to Gifford, “the government tool,” exposing the shameless mendacity of the statements to his discredit. His crime consisted in the fact, not that he had written one of the best critical estimates of Shakespeare that had appeared in Britain, but that he had also published a volume of Political Essays, gleaned from his contributions to the Examiner and other journals, in which he had exposed the abuses and advocated the reform of the British government, on the same principles which Bright, Mill, Goldwin Smith, and other enlightened publicists advocate progress and freedom to-day. Meantime, of the five poets who had at the beginning of the century melodiously sounded the tocsin of democracy, Byron and Shelley had become exiles, and died abroad in their youth ; and Southey and Wordsworth lapsed from their youthful ardor as reformers, and became conservative philosophers ; while William Hazlitt, who " wanted the accomplishment of verse,” continued to fight the battle in the heart of the enemy’s camp. How far the injustice he suffered embittered his soul and tainted the “calm air of delightful studies,” wherein he was so sequestered in appearance, and yet so exposed in reality to the shafts of detraction, we may infer from many a burst of indignation and stroke of irony. He met an old fellow-student on the Continent, some years later, and says of their interview : “ I had some difficulty in making him realize the full length of the malice, the lying, the hypocrisy, the sleek adulation, the meanness, and the equivocation of the Quarterly Review, the blackguardism of the Blackwood, and the obtuse drivelling prolificacy of the John Bull. Of the various periodicals for which Hazlitt wrote, none was so auspicious as the London Magazine ; he was ill-treated by the managers of the dailies ; his articles in the Edinburgh were manipulated by Jeffrey, and several of the other vehicles he adopted were, on the score of remuneration or duration, unsatisfactory. But the first editor of the London Magazine was an appreciative and sympathetic purveyor in the field of letters ; his contributors were his friends, and accordingly they were mutually efficient ; there the most exquisite papers of Elia first saw the light, and Hazlitt’s “TableTalk ” grew into the delectable and suggestive volume it became. During all these years, when his pen was so busy, he migrated from one lodging to another, made frequent rural excursions, stole away to the “ Hut ” at Winterslow to elaborate some favorite theme, was a regular attendant on Lamb’s Wednesday evenings, took his mutton occasionally with Haydon, was welcomed to Basil Montagu’s fireside, visited the picture-galleries of the kingdom, associated with Leigh Hunt and Barry Cornwall, kept a sharp eye on politics and a fond one on the stage, and was an habitué of the Southampton Coffee-House, where he had a special seat, as did Dryden of old at Wills, a favorite waiter, and a knot of originals of various callings, whose talk entertained or whose characters interested him. The “ Liberal,” started by Byron and Shelley for Hunt’s benefit, elicited something characteristic from Hazlitt during its short career ; and the Academy exhibitions, as well as the drama and its representatives, continued to afford him salient topics of discussion. He was present on the memorable night of Kean’s first success, when he played Shylock at Drury Lane, and Mrs. Siddons, Kitty Stephens, and other eminent histrionic contemporaries found critical appreciation at his hands. In the midst of this vagrant work and pastime his domestic affairs reached a climax. The only tie that bound him and Mrs. Hazlitt in mutual feeling was love for their boy. Hazlitt, in these later quarters of his, lived apart from her. And then occurred the most remarkable of the moral vicissitudes of his life. He had such a love of beauty united to a craving for truth, that women were a delicious torment to him, and at times he must have felt for them the kind of fear poor Leopardi so vividly describes. There are traces all through his life of attachments, or perhaps we should say admirations, sometimes what the Germans would call “ affinities ” ; he often eloquently alludes to faces, forms, and places associated with the tender passion; Lamb joked about a rustic idol Hazlitt met while an itinerant portrait-painter, for which love-dream the swains threatened to duck him. We have references to a Liverpool fair one, to a high-born lady, whose beauty was rather enhanced than marred, in his imagination, by the ravages of small-pox ; and even the calm, virgin figure of Miss Wordsworth has been evoked from its maidenly sequestration as a supposed “ intended ” of Hazlitt. One who inherits his name and reveres his memory says : “ I believe he was physically incapable of fixing his affections upon a single object.” There is, however, no more common fallacy than that which regards youth as the only or the chief period when the tender passion takes the deepest hold : nothing can exceed the possible intensity of feeling in a mature man who has seen the world without becoming hardened or perverted thereby, and who has escaped strong attractions, if he encounters one thus, as it were, with “ the strong necessity of loving” full upon him, and especially if, like Hazlitt, he combines passion with insight, an acute, vigilant observation with an eager heart. Therefore when Hazlitt fell in with Sarah Walker, the daughter of his tailor landlord, with her Madonna face, and to him fascinating figure, form, and “ ways,” and found her an “ exquisite witch,” he was enamored to a degree and in a manner perfectly accountable, when we consider his temperament, nature, and circumstances. His fevered wooing, his fitful distrust, his “hopes and fears that kindle hope,” his tenderness, curiosity, and despair, as recorded in the “ Liber Amoris,” are a genuine psychological revelation, — “the outpourings of an imagination always supernaturally vivid and now morbidly so.” His agony is too well described not to have originated in the most terrible conflict between perceptions singularly keen and an attraction irresistible. The writing and printing of this baffled lover record seems most indelicate and imprudent, until we remember that the retrospect of an “honest hallucination ” has for a psychologist a curious interest as a study of consciousness and observation, and accept De Quincey’s explanation,-—-“it was an explosion of frenzy ; the sole remedy was to empty his overburdened heart.” To add to the “curiosities of literature” and “ the infirmities of genius ” involved in this matter, Hazlitt carried a copy of “ Liber Amoris ” to Italy, bound in velvet, on a bridal tour with his second wife; and the first literary job he undertook after his love-sorrow was to describe a prize-fight, and that with no small zest and minuteness.

It is always difficult to distribute justly the blame in cases of divorce by mutual consent. When Hazlitt and his wife went to Scotland, and, after many delays and the usual technical forms, succeeded in effecting a legal separation, there appeared no bitterness of feeling on either side ; he was miserar ble from an unreciprocated attachment and harassed for want of money. Mrs. Hazlitt, sharing the latter difficulty, was singularly practical, self-possessed, and business-like in her conduct; both were solicitous about the immediate comfort and future prospects of their son. We often hear expressions of surprise, and not infrequently of indignation, when the widow of a gifted and renowned man forms a second alliance. But in the case of artistic or literary fame, we are apt to forget that the endowments this distinction implies, so far from being auspicious, are often detrimental to conjugal sympathy. There are, indeed, memorable exceptions, beautiful instances, where women are so constituted as to feel a deep sympathy with such pursuits, and to love as well as honor their worthy votaries ; but, on the other hand, the egotism these pursuits are apt to breed and the self-absorption they exact leave no adequate scope for the affections ; the conjugal are secondary to the professional claims ; and in such cases, however conscientious a man’s life-companion may be in wifely duty and devotion, she may, if of rich womanly instincts, find greater happiness in her more complete and less interrupted relations with a man whose vocation is comparatively incidental and whose heart is wholly hers. “ Women,” writes Hazlitt in a letter of counsel to his son, “care nothing about poets, philosophers, or politicians ; they go by a man’s looks or manners.” He told his wife she never appreciated him ; and there is an objective way of alluding to his eccentricities in her diary and letters, which shows how little affinity there was between them. Having obtained his divorce and failed to secure the “ exquisite witch ” for a wife, he seems to have overcome the immediate effects of his disappointment with marvellous celerity ; and we hear of him erelong as married to a widow named Bridgewater, who had some property as well as attractions, and with whom and his son he at once started on a Continental tour, the record of which he sent to a leading journal, and afterwards published in a volume under the title of “ Notes of a Tour to France and Italy.” This memorial of travel is eloquent of enjoyment, observation, and thought. He revelled again over what remained of his favorite pictures in the Louvre ; he lingered fondly in the Tribune and the Vatican ; hailed the scene of the Decameron and the sublimity of Chamouni ; criticised the viands by the way, and “ drank the empyrean ” amid the Alps. He had glimpses of Lucien Bonaparte and Mezzofanti, and talks with Landor ; passed a delightful summer at Vevay, loitered in the garden of the Tuileries, and felt when the air of an Italian spring fanned his worn and weary brow as if his life had begun anew. The picture-galleries were his favorite resource ; in the midst of the grandest scenery he writes, “ I swear that St. Peter Martyr is finer.” His conversation, said one who fell in with him on the journey, “ I thought better than any book on the art pictorial I had ever read.” His moods and independence are alike evident in his written impressions ; strange to say, Rome and the Correggios at Parma disappointed him ; he recognized in the Northern Italians a race that only required “ to be let alone,” to prosper and progress ; he liked the manners of the priesthood and relished the church ceremonies. “ I am,” he writes, “no admirer of pontificals, but I am slave to the picturesque.” Curiously enough, he was taken with Ferrara, then a desolate old city. “ Of all places I have seen in Italy,” he remarks, “ it is the one which I should by far most care to live in.” The reformer, however, is never lost in the art-lover. The sight of captive doves fluttering he compares to nations trying to fly from despotic sway ; and he turned aside from the highway “to lose in the roar of Velino tumbling from its rocky height, and the wild freedom of nature, his hatred of tyranny and tyrants.” He came home through Holland, which country he graphically describes, bringing his son, but leaving his wife with her relatives abroad, and she never rejoined him ; so that his second matrimonial venture does not appear to have succeeded any better than the first. He was soon at work again in London lodgings ; engaged upon his “ Conversations with Northcote,” contributions to the Weekly Review, and the “ Life of Napoleon,” — to him a labor of love, but unsuccessful as a literary enterprise. The paternal sentiment was strong in Hazlitt, and intellectual society continued to be his chosen pastime to the last. Never robust, although an expert cricket-player, and a good pedestrian, the gastric ailment to which he was liable increased with the inroads of study and disappointment, so that his health gradually failed, and on the 18th of September, 1830, be calmly expired at his lodgings in Frith Street, with his son and his old friend Lamb beside him. “ Well, I have had a happy life,” is the last audible phrase from his lips. It strikes one familiar with the vicissitudes of his career, and the sources of irritation inherent in his organization, with surprise, until the compensatory nature of intellectual resources, the relish of a keen mind and voluptuous temperament, even amid privations and baffled feeling, is remembered : to appreciate what life was to William Hazlitt, we must understand the man, and not dwell exclusively on his outward experiences.

Seldom have the idiosyncrasies and inmost experience of an author been more completely revealed ; it has been truly remarked of Hazlitt that there are “few salient points and startling passages in his life that he has omitted to look upon or glance at ” in his essays. The processes and impression of his own mind had such an interest for him, that it was a delight to record and speculate on them. In treating of a work of art or a favorite author, he brought to bear on their interpretation the sympathetic insight born of experience. We know his tastes and antipathies, his prejudices and passions, not only as a whole, but in detail. Authorship was to him a kind of confessional ; incidentally he lets us into many of the secrets of his consciousness. As to the outward man and the habits of his life, carelessness, want of method, and caprice were stamped thereon. His personal appearance, it is certain, was often neglected, notwithstanding Haydon’s sarcasm at finding him absorbed on one occasion before a mirror, and the effective figure he is said to have made when in full dress he went to dine with Curran. When fairly warmed by conversation, his manner was earnest and unconscious ; but among strangers he was shy, and his way of shaking hands and taking one’s arm was the reverse of cordial. He admitted that he had little claim to be thought a good-natured man. His landladies were annoyed because he scribbled notes for his essays on the mantel-piece. He was a wretched correspondent ; variable in his moods, partly from ill-health and more from a nervous temperament ; he was yet remarkably industrious, as the amount of his writings prove ; but it required the stimulus of necessity or the attraction of a subject to enlist his attention. His mind was naturally clear, fervid, and sensitive. “ In his natural and healthy state,” says Lamb, “ one of the wisest and finest spirits I ever knew.” “ Without the imagination of Coleridge,” says Procter, “ he had almost as much subtlety and far more steadfastness of mind.” Apparently an idler until thirty, he was, at the same time, a desultory but devoted reader and a constant thinker. He was a notable illustration of “ imperfect sympathy.” Lamb, with whom he was most consistently intimate, failed to satisfy him, because he was no partisan, — an æsthetic rather than a reformer; he was disgusted with Moore’s aristocratic proclivities; his admiration of Scott was modified by hatred of his toryism ; he almost alienated Hunt by abusing Shelley, and never forgave Southey and Coleridge for their defection from the political faith of their youth ; he recoiled from friendly Montagu, because he imagined he put on airs, and Haydon’s egotism offended as much as his art displeased him; he took De Quincey to task for repeating his antiMalthusian argument without credit: thus, at some point, he always diverged even from minds whose endowments were such as to command his respect and attract his sympathy ; and this distinct line of affinity and repulsion is equally manifest in his estimate of old authors and historical characters. As a writer he is often paradoxical and exaggerated, but usually so either to emphasize a truth, press home a conviction, or give play to a humor, and not from any indifference to truth or levity of feeling. “ I think what I please,” he used to say, “and say what I think; it has been my business all my life to get at the truth as well as I could, to satisfy my own mind.” It has been noted that even in his analysis of Shakespeare characters, — profoundly as he admired their human consistency and authentic traits, — there is a cool discrimination which indicates shortcomings or incongruities. In such essays as those on “A Portrait by Vandyke,” “ Knowledge of One’s Self,” “ The Feeling of Immortality in Youth,” and “ People we should wish to have seen,” the sincerity and refinement of his intellectual sympathy and moral sentiment are evident. His ideal was well defined and high, and he was too much in earnest not to deeply feel his own failure. What he says in reference to the disappointment of his artistic aspirations illustrates this : “ If a French artist fails, he is not discouraged ; there is something else he excels in ; it he cannot paint he can dance. If an Englishman fails in anything he thinks he can do, enraged at the mention of his ability to do anything else, and at any consolation offered him, he banishes all thought but of his disappointment, and, discarding hope from his breast, neither eats nor sleeps, — it is well if he does not cut his throat, — will not attend to anything in which he before took an interest, and is in despair till he recovers his good opinion of himself in the point in which he has been disgraced.” Although this is exactly the difference between self-esteem and vanity, and so far nationally characteristic, it is especially true of the individual Englishman who wrote it. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that Hazlitt, while a votary of art and literature, was also an enthusiastic and baffled reformer. “ He went down to the dust,” says one of his gifted contemporaries, “ without having won the crown for which he had so bravely struggled.” When thought and feeling were enlisted strongly in his work, his style is vigorous and vivid ; sometimes from the inevitable “job” — the will instead of the mood — it lapsed into what is called “mechanical description.” Judged by his legitimate utterance, his writings are what he called them, — the thoughts of a metaphysician uttered by a painter. “As for my style,” he says, “ I thought little about it. I only used the word which seemed to me to signify the ideas wanted to convey, and I did not rest till I had got it; in seeking for truth I sometimes found beauty .” George Daniel, in 1817, portrayed him, and John Hunt testified to the authenticity of the portrait; “Wan and worn, with a melancholy expression, but an eager look and a dissecting eye.” His rejoinder to the savage attacks of his opponents was : “ I am no politician, and still less can I be said to be a party man ; but I have a hatred for tyranny and a contempt for its tools, and this feeling I have expressed as often and as strongly as I could. The success of the great cause to which I had vowed myself was to me more than all the world.”

Hazlitt’s life has been described as a “ conflict between a magnificent intellect and morbid, miserly, physical influences ” ; and one of the warmest admirers of his talents accuses him of “ an amazing amount of wilful extravagance ” in the expression of his thoughts. Flow far his social defects were owing to material causes it is impossible to determine ; but that temperament had quite as much to do with his isolation as temper there is no doubt. Indeed, he admits, towards the close of his life, that he had quarrelled with almost all his friends ; and, although in an exigency like that which obliged him to write to Patmore “ off Scarborough,” when writhing under his unfortunate love affair, “ what have I suffered since I parted from you; a raging fire in my heart and brain ; the steamboat seems a prison-house,” yet his ideal of friendship was chiefly intellectual; he says, for instance, of Northcote ; “ His hand is closed, but what of that? His eye is ever open and reflects the universe. I never ate or drank in his house, but I have lived on his conversation with undiminished relish ever since I can remember.” When engaged as a reporter, and obliged to remain late at night in the gallery of the House of Commons, lie formed the baneful habit of resorting to stimulants to counteract the effects of exposure and exhaustion upon a frame naturally sensitive ; but, before this practice had made any serious inroads upon his constitution, warned by illness and medical advice, he abandoned it and maintained this voluntary abstinence heroically to the end of his life. There are several anecdotes which indicate his nervous dread of burglars and fire. Intended for a Unitarian preacher, by nature a metaphysician, and by choice a painter, he became “ a writer under protest ” ; and he explains what seems paradoxical in his essays thus : “ I have to bring out some obscure distinction, or to combat some strong prejudice, and in doing this, with all my might, I have overshot the mark.” It is remarkable how soon the art of expression came, even when first resorted to, at an age when the habits are usually formed. “ I had not,” he writes in 1812, “until then been in the habit of writing at all, or had been a long time about it, but I perceived that with the necessity the fluency came.” One of the earliest cheering circumstances of his literary career was the appearance of an American edition of his “ Character of Shakespeare,” a few weeks after it was published in England, with the Boston imprint. It was for him “ a genuine triumph.” His idea of pastime was “a little comfortable cheer and careless indolent chat ” ; he shrank from the formal routine of society, and thought that to have his own way, and do what he pleased when he pleased, even at the cost of some lack of luxury and show, was infinitely preferable to the most successful official or commercial life. A cup of strong tea and to go to the play afterwards was better to him than all the solemn magnificence of London society ; and yet no one better appreciated the freedom and opportunities of metropolitan intercourse. “ London,” he writes, “is the only place where each individual in company is treated according to his value in company and for nothing else.” He was, however, keenly alive to the indifference of the crowd as regards intellectual claims and the estimate of an author: “ They read his books, but have no clew to penetrate into the last recesses of his mind, and attribute the height of abstraction to a more than ordinary share of stupidity.” He deemed it comparatively easy to be amiable if not in earnest. “ Coleridge,” he observes, “ used to complain of my irascibility, though if he had possessed a little of my tenaciousness and jealousy of temper, the cause of liberty would have gained thereby.” By nature, indeed, Hazlitt loved the tranquil pleasures of thought ; hence partly his appreciation of art ; the sight of a noble, calm head made him resolve to be in future self-possessed and allow nothing to disturb him ; to be, in a word, the character thus delineated. “ I want,” he declared, “ to see my vague notions float, like the down of the thistle before the breeze, and not to have them entangled in the briers of controversy.” What such a man and mind could be to intimate and congenial associates we can easily imagine. The death of Hazlitt was to Lamb not only a bereavement in the ordinary sense, but his relish of life was thenceforth greatly diminished; an element of sympathetic and acute appreciation through and with which he had enjoyed and analyzed its phenomena was taken away. A poem, a play, a story, or a character needs for its complete zest a bon convive, quite as much as feasts of a material kind. It is, indeed, the redeeming charm of the literary life, where an honest and superior capacity therefor exists, that we are made as in no other way to feel how great are the native resources and how insignificant comparatively the material luxuries of life. All this world of enjoyment, this fervent communion with the genius of the past, this curious investigation of the mysteries of humanity, this benign and refreshing “division of the records of the mind,” this noble pursuit of truth and appreciation of knowledge and love of beauty and sympathy with what is magnanimous, original, and glorious, — these charming Wednesday evenings at Lamb’s, and exhilarating walks with Coleridge, and poetic readings with Wordsworth, and critical commentaries, brilliant repartees, ingenuous humors, have no dependence on or relation to the costly and artificial routine and arrangements which, to the unaspiring and the vain, constitute life ; often and chiefly, rather, are they associated with frugal households, with humble homes, limited prospects, ay, with drudgery and self-denial.

The most pleasant and perhaps the most profitable influence derived from Hazlitt is intellectual zest, the keen appreciation and magnetic enjoyment of truth and beauty in literature, character, and life. He was an epicurean in this regard, delighting to renew the vivid experience of the past by the glow of deliberate reminiscence, and to associate his best moods for work and his most genial studies with natural scenery and physical comfort: no writer ever more delicately fused sensation and sentiment; drew from sunshine, fireside, landscape, air, viands, and vagabondage more delectable adjuncts of reflection. He delighted to let his mind “ lie fallow ” and hated “ a lie, and the formal crust of circumstances, and the mechanism of society”; and, moreover, had a rare facility in escaping both. “ What a walk was that ! ” he exclaims in allusion to a favorite road at Winterslow ; “I had no need of book or companion ; the days, the hours, the thoughts of my youth are at my side and blend with the air that fans my cheek ; the future was barred to my progress, and I turned for consolation and encouragement to the past. I lived in a world of contemplation, not of action. This sort of dreamy existence is the best.” He went on a pilgrimage to Wisbeach in Cambridgeshire, to see the town where his mother was born, and the poor farm-house where she was reared, and the “gate where she told him she used to stand, when a child of ten, to look at the setting sun.” The sight of a row of cabbage-plants or beans made him, through life, think of the happy hours passed in the humble parsonage-garden at Wem, which he tended with delight when a boy ; and he never saw a kite in the air without feeling the twinge at the elbow and the flutter at the heart with which he used to let go the string of his own when a child. Every aspect of nature during his memorable first walk with Coleridge is remembered: “As we passed along between Wem and Salisbury, and I eyed the blue tops of the Welsh mountains seen through the wintry branches, or the red leaves of the sturdy oak-trees by the roadside, a sound was in my ears as of a siren’s song.” And again, returning from the town where he had heard him preach: “ The sun, still laboring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the good cause, and the cold, dank drops of dew that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle had something genial and refreshing in them, for there was a spirit of youth and hope in all nature.” Never, perhaps, had Madame de Staël’s maxim — “when we are much attached to our ideas we endeavor to attach everything to them” — a more striking illustration than Hazlitt’s idiosyncrasy. After parting with Coleridge and in anticipation of a visit to him, he tells us : “ I went to Llangollen vale by way of initiating myself in the mysteries of natural scenery ; that valley was to me the cradle of a new existence ; in the river that winds through it my spirit was baptized in the waters of Helicon.” And again, speaking of the folios in his father’s library, and the impression the sight of them made on his childhood, “there was not,” he writes, “one striking reflection, one sally of wit; yet we can never forget the feeling with which not only their appearance, but the names of their authors on the outside, inspired us ; we would rather have this feeling again for one half-hour, than to be possessed of all the acuteness of Boyle or the wit of Voltaire.” It is easy to imagine from such inklings of experience how completely he must have fraternized with Rousseau and why the Nouvelle Heloïse was the favorite of his youth. “ I was wet through, and stopped at an inn,” he says, describing an excursion, “ and sat up all night reading Paul and Virginia. Sweet were the showers that drenched my body and sweet the drops of pity that fell upon the book I read ” ; and what a zest is implied in this statement; “ I recollect walking out while reading the ‘Simple Story,’to escape from one of the tenderest parts, in order to return to it again with double relish. An old crazy hand-organ was playing Robin Adair, and a summer shower dropt manna on my head and slaked my feverish thirst of happiness.” Pondering a catalogue of the Louvre before he crossed the Channel, he says : “The pictures, the names of the painters, seemed to relish in the mouth.” A march of ten miles in fine weather, with a pleasant retreat and dinner in prospect at the end, was his ideal of enjoyment, and none of the genial company of English authors ever better knew the “luxury of an inn.” “ Tired out,” he writes, “between Faraham and Alton, I was shown to a room in a wayside inn, a hundred years old, overlooking an oldfashioned garden with beds of larkspur and a leaden Mercury. It was wainscoted, and had a dark-colored portrait of Charles the Second over a tiled chimney-piece. I had ‘ Love for Love ’ in my pocket and began to read ; coffee was brought in a silver coffee-pot; the cream, bread, and butter were excellent, and the flavor of Congreve’s style prevailed over all.” When travelling in Switzerland, he came upon a place that won his preference at once, and for these reasons : “ It was a kind of retreat where there is nothing to surprise, nothing to disgust, nothing to draw the attention out of itself, uniting the advantages of society and solitude, of simplicity and elegance and self-centred satisfaction.” One more illustration of this rare capacity for enjoyment derivable from personal endowment and instinct, acting on circumstances of the humblest and most familiar kind must suffice. It is a reminiscence of his provincial tour as an artist: “I once lived on coffee for a fortnight, while I was finishing the copy of a half-length portrait of a Manchester manufacturer who died worth a plum. I rather slurred over the coat, which was of a reddish-brown, of a formal cut, to receive my five guineas, with which I went to market and dined on sausages and mashed potatoes; and, while they were getting ready and I could hear them hissing in the pan, read a volume of Gil Blas containing the account of the fair Aurora. Gentle reader, do not smile ! neither Monsieur de Nevy nor Louis XVIII. over an oyster paté, nor Apicius himself, ever understood the meaning of the word luxury better than I did at that moment.” It was this zestful spirit, this association of ideas, that enabled him through intense sympathy to enter intelligently into the characters of Shakespeare, and to analyze the poets, actors, and comic writers ; while it also placed him wisely in relation with "The Spirit of the Age,” which he so eloquently illustrated, gave him that thorough appreciation of the benignity of freedom, which nerved him to battle for her triumph, identified him with the feeling of the old masters in art, and equipped and inspired him to write acutely and with the charm of independent thought of the laws, phenomena, and mysteries of human life and character.

• List of the Writings of William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, chronologically arranged ; with Notes Descriptive, Critical, and Explanatory ; and a Selection of Opinions regarding their Genius and Character. By Alexander Ireland. London : John Russell Smith. ↩

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On the Pleasure of Hating Essays Summary By William Hazlitt

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“On the Pleasure of Hating” is an essay written by William Hazlitt , an English essayist and literary critic, first published in 1826. In this essay, Hazlitt explores the complex and often contradictory nature of human emotions, particularly the pleasure derived from hating or disliking something or someone.

On the Pleasure of Hating Essays Summary By Hazlitt- The essay begins with Hazlitt’s observation that hatred is a powerful and prevalent emotion that is often considered negative or destructive. However, he argues that there is a certain satisfaction and enjoyment to be found in hating. He believes that hating allows individuals to assert their own superiority and assert their independence of judgment. Hatred can be seen as a form of rebellion against societal norms and expectations.

On the Pleasure of Hating Essays Summary By Hazlitt- Hazlitt further delves into the various objects of hatred, such as institutions, customs, and individuals. He discusses the concept of hating inanimate objects or abstract ideas and the cathartic release it provides. He also explores the hatred directed towards other people and the reasons behind it, including envy, rivalry, or a sense of injustice.

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On the Pleasure of Hating Essays Summary By Hazlitt- According to Hazlitt, hating can be seen as an expression of individuality and personal freedom. He argues that the ability to hate shows that one is not easily swayed by popular opinions or influenced by social pressures. It is an assertion of one’s own identity and beliefs.

In the latter part of the essay, Hazlitt acknowledges the dangers of unchecked hatred. He warns against excessive and destructive forms of hatred that can lead to violence, cruelty, and dehumanization. He cautions that while hating can be pleasurable, it should be tempered with reason and understanding.

On the Pleasure of Hating Essays Summary By Hazlitt- Overall, “On the Pleasure of Hating” is a thought-provoking essay that explores the complexities of human emotions. It offers insights into the nature of hatred, its psychological and social implications, and the potential for both positive and negative consequences.

About William Hazlitt

On the Pleasure of Hating Essays Summary By Hazlitt- William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was an English essayist, literary critic, and social commentator. He was born on April 10, 1778, in Maidstone, Kent, England. Hazlitt is known for his insightful and provocative writings, covering a wide range of topics including literature, politics, art, and human emotions.

On the Pleasure of Hating Essays Summary By Hazlitt- Hazlitt was part of the Romantic literary movement and is considered one of the most significant essayists of his time. His writing style was characterized by its clarity, wit, and intellectual depth. He expressed his opinions and ideas with passion and often challenged conventional wisdom.

Throughout his career, Hazlitt contributed to various publications, including The Morning Chronicle, The Examiner, and The Edinburgh Review. He wrote extensively on literature and theater, providing literary criticism and analysis of renowned authors such as William Shakespeare and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

On the Pleasure of Hating Essays Summary By Hazlitt- Hazlitt’s essays were known for their independent and often controversial views. He explored diverse subjects such as the nature of art, the importance of individuality, the role of government, and the complexities of human emotions. One of his notable works is “The Spirit of the Age,” a collection of essays that examines the leading figures of his time, including writers, politicians, and artists.

In addition to his essays, Hazlitt also lectured on various topics, attracting audiences with his engaging and thought-provoking speeches. Some of his notable lecture series include “Lectures on the English Poets” and “Lectures on the Comic Writers.”

On the Pleasure of Hating Essays Summary By Hazlitt- Hazlitt’s writing and lectures had a significant influence on subsequent generations of writers and thinkers. His works continue to be studied and appreciated for their literary and intellectual contributions. Hazlitt passed away on September 18, 1830, in Soho, London, leaving behind a legacy of insightful and influential writings.

“On the Pleasure of Hating” by William Hazlitt delves into the intriguing topic of the pleasure derived from hating or disliking something or someone. Hazlitt explores the multifaceted nature of this emotion, acknowledging that while hatred can provide a certain satisfaction and sense of independence, it also carries the risk of becoming destructive and harmful.

On the Pleasure of Hating Essays Summary By Hazlitt- Throughout the essay, Hazlitt emphasizes the individuality and personal freedom inherent in the act of hating. He argues that the ability to hate allows individuals to assert their own judgments and resist conforming to societal expectations. However, he also recognizes the importance of reason and understanding in tempering excessive and dangerous forms of hatred.

Hazlitt’s essay prompts readers to reflect on their own emotions and the motivations behind their dislikes and hatreds. It challenges conventional notions of negativity associated with hatred and invites a nuanced understanding of this complex emotion. By examining the objects and consequences of hatred, Hazlitt encourages readers to consider the potential for both positive and negative outcomes stemming from their emotions.

On the Pleasure of Hating Essays Summary By Hazlitt- Ultimately, “On the Pleasure of Hating” presents a thought-provoking exploration of human emotions and offers insights into the psychological, social, and moral aspects of hating. It serves as a reminder of the need for self-reflection, empathy, and rationality in navigating our emotions to ensure that our expressions of hatred do not devolve into destructive forces but instead contribute to personal growth and a more compassionate society.

Q: What is the main idea of “On the Pleasure of Hating”? 

A: The main idea of “On the Pleasure of Hating” is that there is a certain satisfaction and enjoyment derived from the act of hating or disliking something or someone. Hazlitt explores the complexities of this emotion, discussing its psychological and social implications, as well as its potential for both positive and negative consequences.

Q: What does Hazlitt mean by the “pleasure” of hating? 

A : Hazlitt suggests that the pleasure of hating lies in the sense of personal superiority and independence it provides. Hating allows individuals to assert their own judgments and resist conforming to societal expectations. It can be seen as a form of rebellion and an assertion of one’s own identity and beliefs.

Q: Does Hazlitt advocate for unchecked hatred? 

A: No, Hazlitt does not advocate for unchecked hatred. While he acknowledges the pleasure that can be derived from hating, he also warns against excessive and destructive forms of hatred. He cautions that hatred should be tempered with reason and understanding to prevent it from leading to violence, cruelty, or dehumanization.

Q: How does Hazlitt view the relationship between hating and individuality? 

A: Hazlitt views hating as a way for individuals to assert their own individuality and independence of judgment. He believes that the ability to hate shows that one is not easily swayed by popular opinions or influenced by social pressures. Hating can be seen as a means of expressing one’s own identity and beliefs separate from societal norms and expectations.

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Common sense by william hazlitt summary

Paine wrote his pamphlet Common Sense to convince the struggling colonists that succession from the British monarchy was not only inevitable, but also Justified, and that It was time for the people of the American colonies to rise up against the British control. At this time the American Revolution had been In progress for about a year and the colonists were divided about what to do.

There were Patriots fighting for independence, Loyalist who were still loyal to Great Britain, and those who were still undecided and sympathetic to the colonist’s grievances but weren’t ready to risk going to war by severing ties to Great Britain. Paine wrote Common Sense because of these divisions among the colonist to urge them to unit and sever the ties to their Mother country.

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To help convince those who were still undecided Paine presented arguments such as how it was absurd for an Island to rule a Continent, how America could avoid European conflicts by being free of Great Britain, how London was too far from America to rule it, and that the King ND Parliament would rule for Great Britain’s benefit, not the colonists.

Loyalist and many of those who were still undecided often stated that the colonist were not Justified In rebelling because Great Brutal had helped and supported America, however, Paine countered this In his pamphlet by stating that Great Britain only looked over America to ensure their own personal economic welfare. This argument and others, helped to convince many of those who were undecided to join ranks with the Patriots and strengthen the resolution of those already fighting the British control.

This strengthened resolution lead to one of the first successful colonial actions performed in this time period, the Declaration of Independence and later the development of a new nation. In January 1776 the American colonist had two choices to choose from. They could unit in the American Revolution or they could reconcile with Great Britain. Both choices would be difficult. The American Revolution would cause major changes. They would be cut off financial, and politically from Great Britain. A new government would need to be established and a new nation formed.

They would face many halogens to get to this point, and many challenges running the new nation after it was established. However, the road of reconciliation with Great Britain would be Just as long and difficult, if not more so. The colonies would be punished for their rebellion, and the grievances that lead to such action would still be in place and likely would develop further. The need for unity to succeed in the Revolution War lead Paine to present many arguments for why the British Monarchy was not applicable or acceptable for the American colonies.

These arguments stemmed from the fact that he British system of government was overly complicated. Paine stated “that the more simple any thing Is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered”. He believed that this notion should be applied to systems of governments as well. While examining the English constitution and dissecting It Paine determined that the British system of government was In reality a combination of three systems of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and republic.

The monarchy separated from the people in their country by their social status, and then were seed to make important decisions for those same people who they had no connection to. Because they were separated from the common people, Paine said that “in a constitutional sense they contribute nothing towards the freedom of the state. ” He believed that instead they seemed to cripple the government and recommended the colonist discard this system of government. When referring to the position of the king, Paine stated “it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest Judgment is required”.

Due to the kings social status it required him to be above the pettiness of any lower classes, however, because he was king he was also required to know the happenings of the lower classes thoroughly. This caused the position of the king to be contradictory and thus proving, according to Paine, “the whole character to be absurd and useless”. In addition, Paine brought to light major inconsistencies with regards to the kings power and parliament’s power. The kings power was restricted by parliament, while parliament’s power was dependent on the kings approval.

During this time it was still lived that monarchs received their right to govern through the process of the diving right of kings. Because this was still a widely held belief Paine argued that the British government’s authority must not be from God since any authority given by God would not need to be looked after by another outside party, such as the English parliament. Paine also foresaw some people arguing that the British government was considered the best in the world, but he countered that “the prejudice of Englishmen, in favor of their own government by king, lords, and commons, arises as much or ore from national pride than reason. He consented that in English communities “individuals are undoubtedly safer in England than in some other countries,” but he believed that this was due culture of the English people, rather than to their government. Paine concluded that the people needed to rid themselves of their predisposition towards the British government before they could clearly see a better form of government that was accountable to the people. Once this was accomplished, Paine believed that the American colonies were the est. equipped in this situation to cut themselves off from Great Britain.

They had everything they needed to sustain themselves without the help of their mother country. They have the resources, they have the capacity to build an army, and they have been governing themselves since Great Britain is so far away. All that is required is for the colonies to unit together. “No country on the globe is so happily situated, so internally capable…. Tar, timber, iron, and cordage are her natural produce. We need go abroad for nothing. Additionally, America’s mission for redeem, both religious and physical freedom from Great Britain, is exactly what the population of the world was aiming and striving for. Paine was right. Due to the separation from Great Britain, the United States emerged and is currently one of the only countries that not only believes, but practices and values freedom. This freedom was the bases of Pain’s Common Sense. “We have it in our power,” insisted Paine, “to begin the world all over again. ” This is why we now have the United States. No changes needed as the American Revolution was.

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Analysis of Common Sense

Common Sense by Thomas Paine In his book, Common Sense, Thomas Paine provides a very clear objective: to persuade American colonists to fight against the British Empire and become an independent nation. He begins on this pre-revolutionary pamphlet with general comments about the current state of the government and that people have a strong habit

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Common Sense

Thomas paine, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Thomas Paine's Common Sense . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Common Sense: Introduction

Common sense: plot summary, common sense: detailed summary & analysis, common sense: themes, common sense: quotes, common sense: characters, common sense: symbols, common sense: literary devices, common sense: theme wheel, brief biography of thomas paine.

Historical Context of Common Sense

Other books related to common sense.

• Full Title: Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America
• When Written: 1775-1776
• Where Written: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• When Published: January 10, 1776 (first edition)
• Literary Period: Enlightenment
• Genre: Political Pamphlet
• Climax: After breaking down his moral reasoning for American independence, Paine urges his readers not to wait—the present is the appropriate time to incite a revolution.
• Antagonist: Great Britain; King George III
• Point of View: First Person; Second Person

Extra Credit for Common Sense

Gone Viral. Common Sense was an unprecedented publishing success. Though estimates vary, it may have sold as many as 500,000 copies in the colonies by the end of the American Revolution, meaning that an estimated 20 percent of colonists would have owned a copy—especially remarkable given that its popularity spread primarily by word of mouth.

Trying Times. In late 1776, George Washington ordered his officers to read part of Paine’s The American Crisis , a pamphlet series following up on Common Sense , to the Continental Army on the eve of the crossing of the Delaware.

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Summary of William Hazlitt The Indian Jugglers

The essay describes a remarkable feat of human ingenuity, performed by an Indian juggler. The juggler can catch four balls in succession in less than a second, making them revolve around him and chase one another like sparkles of fire. This precision and rapidity are like mathematical truths, and the juggler’s grace and carelessness make the audience laugh and enjoy the spectacle.

The juggler’s skill surpasses difficulty, and beauty triumphs over skill. The difficulty once mastered resolves into ease and grace, and to overcome it, it must be overcome without effort. The juggler’s feet are bare, and his rings on his toes turn round all the time.

The author is ashamed of his own abilities and wonders what he can do as well as the jugglers. He believes that he has been doing nothing but wasting his life, trying to prove arguments in the teeth of facts and looking for causes in the dark. He tries to write a description of the jugglers’ abilities, but finds them to be ill-written and ill-structured.

The author is fond of arguing, but with practice and pain, he can often beat his opponent. A common fencer would disarm his adversary in the blink of an eye, but there is no complete mastery of execution. The professor is different from the impudent pretender or the mere clown.

The author expresses dissatisfaction with intellectual progress compared to mechanical excellence, comparing the rope-dancer’s performance to the rope-dancer’s skill. He argues that mechanical dexterity is confined to performing a specific task repeatedly, with the point of perfection being succeeding in the task. In contrast, mechanical efforts require continuous practice and improvement, as the object to be attained is not a matter of taste, fancy, or opinion but actual experimentation.

The author argues that danger, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn, and laughter are essential for learning and developing skills. They argue that there is no opportunity for self-delusion, idling time away, or being off guard. The author also discusses the ambiguity of style in manual dexterity, as the juggler cannot make a bad antithesis without cutting his fingers.

The author argues that manual dexterity involves gradual aptitude acquired through constant repetition and an exact knowledge of what is still needed. Muscles ply instinctively to the dictates of habit, and the limbs require little more than to be put in motion for them to follow a regular track with ease and certainty. The author compares this to the mechanical precision of Locksley in Ivanhoe, who shoots at a mark to allow for the wind.

Perfection in mechanical exercises involves performing feats to a uniform nicety, which is achievable only by the individual’s own abilities. The mechanical performer must emulate themselves, not equal another, and there is no abstract standard of difficulty or excellence beyond their own powers. The artist must imitate nature or copy what nature has done, which is more difficult than keeping up four brass balls simultaneously. Reynolds, for example, is more respected than Richer, as he could dance on a rope like Reynolds but paint like Sir Joshua.

The objects of fine art are not objects of sight but objects of taste and imagination, appealing to the sense of beauty, pleasure, and power in the human breast. Nature is also a language, and the true artist interprets this language by knowing its application to other objects in different situations. The more ethereal part of art is seeing nature through the medium of sentiment and passion, as each object symbolizes the affections and a link in our endless being.

The power of the Muse’s gift, or genius, imagination, feeling, and taste, is the key to unraveling this mysterious web of thought and feeling. The mechanical excellence of Dutch painters in colouring and handling is the nearest in fine art to the perfection of certain manual exhibitions of skill. Up to a certain point, everything is faultless, but there is only a need for taste and genius. The undefined and imaginary regions are difficult and doubtful, and execution comes with practice.

Cleverness is a talent or aptitude for performing certain tasks, often requiring liveliness, intelligence, or sleight of hand. Accomplishments are external graces that can be learned from others and are displayed to the beholder. These are appropriate for those with ease in mind and fortune. Talent is the capacity to perform tasks that depend on application and industry, such as writing a criticism or studying the law. Talent differs from genius, as voluntary differs from involuntary power. Ingenuity is genius in trifles, while greatness is genius in undertakings of great importance. A clever or ingenious man can do any task well, while a great man can do something of the highest importance. Themistocles’ statement that he could not play on the flute but could make a small city a great one demonstrates the distinction between these two concepts.

Greatness is the power that produces great effects and is not just about having great power in oneself. It must be applied to great purposes, resulting in a lasting impression on others. A great man’s actions and thoughts must be communicated to their understanding, either through an increase of knowledge or by subduing and overawe them. Admiration must be based on proofs from which we cannot escape, and it is neither a slight nor a voluntary gift.

Great men are not just those who have great powers, but also those who shew the marks of a great moving intellect so that we trace the master-mind and can sympathize with the springs that urge them on. The rest is just a craft or mystery. A great man always has an idea of something greater than himself, and it is in the nature of greatness to propagate an idea of itself.

Some sectaries and polemical writers have no higher compliment than to say that a great man was a considerable man in his day. However, greatness is not limited to a rich man, but also extends to his dependants and stewards. 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.

The French have produced three great men that belong to every country: Moliere, Rabelais, and Montaigne. They have produced great men that belong to every country, and greatness sympathizes with greatness, while littleness shrinks into itself. In summary, greatness is a result of great power and the ability to spread it to others.

John Cavanagh, a renowned hand fives-player, was a remarkable example of manual dexterity. He died in 1889, leaving a gap in society as he left a lasting legacy. Cavanagh was twice young, feeling neither past nor future, and had no other desire or thought. He played the game with equal power, skill, quickness, and judgment, out-witting opponents by finesse or beating them by main strength. He could tell the degree of force necessary to be given to a ball and the precise direction in which it should be sent. Cavanagh did his work with greatest ease, never taking more pains than necessary, and was as cool and collected as if he had just entered the court. His style of play was remarkable, with no affectation or trifling, and he did what he could, but that was more than any one else could even affect to do. His blows were not undecided or ineffectual, but rather, they were not ineffectual like other writers’ works. Cavanagh’s death leaves a lasting impact on the game of fives and continues to inspire others to strive for manual dexterity.

Jack Cavanagh was a world-renowned up-hill player who never gave up the game, even when his opponent was fourteen. He never volleyed but allowed the balls to hop, and he never missed having them. Cavanagh was an Irishman by birth and a house-painter by profession. He played with Woodward and Meredith together in the Fives-court, St. Martin’s-street, making seven and twenty aces following by services alone. He was also admired for his ability to give any other player half the game or beat him with his left hand.

Cavanah was an Irishman by birth and a house-painter by profession. He had a clear, open countenance, and was a young fellow of sense, humor, and courage. He once had a quarrel with a waterman at Hungerford-stairs and served him out in great style. There are hundreds today who cannot mention his name without admiration as the best fives-player that perhaps ever lived.

John Davies, the racket-player, was noted for his ability to follow the ball, giving any one of these two hands a foot of wall and giving the best player now in London the same odds. Cavanagh died from a blood-vessel, which prevented him from playing for the last two or three years. He was a first-rate tennis player and an excellent fives-player, and is now the keeper of the Fives-court. Cavanah was a zealous Catholic and could not be persuaded to eat meat on Friday, the day he died. His memory is honored with a tribute to his memory.

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