It has been said often by shallow reviewers, and is said sometimes still, that Hazlitt’s style aims at effect; as if an effect must not be won, without aiming, by a “born man of letters,” as Mr. Saintsbury described him, “who could not help turning into literature everything he touched.”[73] The “effect,” under given conditions, is manifest, unavoidable. Once let Hazlitt speak, as he speaks ever, in the warmth of conviction, and what an intoxicating music begins!—wild as that of the gypsies, and with the same magnet-touch on the sober senses: enough to subvert all “criticism and idle distinction,” and to bring back those Theban times when the force of a sound, rather than masons and surveyors, sent the very walls waltzing into their places.
In the face of diction so joyously clear as his, so sumptuous and splendid, it is well to endorse Mr. Ruskin, that “no right style was ever founded save out of a sincere heart.” It can never be said of William Hazlitt, as Dean Trench well said of those other “great stylists,” Landor and De Quincey, that he had a lack of moral earnestness. What he was determined to impress upon his reader, during the quarter-century while he held a pen, was not that he was knowing, not that he was worthy of the renown and fortune which passed him by, but only that he had rectitude and a consuming passion for good. He declares aloud that his escutcheon has no bar-sinister: he has not sold himself; he has spoken truth in and out of season; he has honored the excellent at his own risk and cost; he has fought for a principle and been slain for it, from his youth up. His sole boast is proven. In a far deeper sense than Leigh Hunt, for whom he forged the lovely compliment, he was “the visionary in humanity, the fool of virtue,” and the captain of those who stood fast, in a hostile day, for ignored and eternal ideals. The best thing to be said of him, the thing for which, in Haydon’s phrase, “everybody must love him,” is that he himself loved justice and hated iniquity. He shared the groaning of the spirit after mortal welfare with Swift and Fielding, with Shelley and Matthew Arnold, with Carlyle and Ruskin; he was corroded with cares and desires not his own. Beside this intense devotedness, what personal flaw will ultimately show? The host who figure in the Roman martyrology hang all their claim upon the fact of martyrdom, and, according to canon law, need not have been saints in their lifetime at all. So with such souls as his: in the teeth of a thousand acknowledged imperfections in life or in art, they remain our exemplars. Let them do what they will, at some one stroke they dignify this earth. It is not Hazlitt, “the born man of letters” alone, but Hazlitt the born humanist, who bequeaths us, from his England of coarse misconception and abuse, a memory like a loadstar, and a name which is a toast to be drunk standing.
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[58] The article on _The Fine Arts_ in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ is signed “W. H.”
[59] Mrs. Hazlitt the first, it would appear, undertook to verify her husband’s quotations for him. His favorite metaphor, “Like the tide which flows on to the Propontic, and knows no ebb,” must have passed many times under her eye. Any reference to Othello himself, in the great scene of Act III., would have shown four lines for William Hazlitt’s explicit one.
[60] Some of Hazlitt’s comments on women are full of unconscious humor. In _Great and Little Things_ he admits being snubbed by the fair, and adds with grandiloquence: “I took a pride in my disgrace, and concluded that I had elsewhere my inheritance!”
[61] In the National Portrait Gallery, London.
[62] _Blackwood’s_, in the charming fashion of the time, repeatedly refers to Hazlitt’s “pimples”; and Byron credited and supplemented the allegation. Hazlitt himself says somewhere “that to lay a thing to a person’s charge from which he is perfectly free, shows spirit and invention!” The calumny is not worth mention, except as a fair specimen of the journalistic methods against which literary men had to contend some eighty years ago.
[63] Lamb had been his groomsman twenty-two years before, at the Church of St. Andrew, Holborn, “and like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony; anything awful makes me laugh!” as he confessed in a letter to Southey in 1815.
[64] Orrery had seen this same bitter indignation overwhelm Swift at times, “so that it is scarcely possible for human features to carry in them more terror and austerity.”
[65] At 19 York Street, Westminster. The house, with its tablet “To the Prince of Poets” set by Hazlitt himself, was destroyed in 1877.
[66] A snappy unpublished letter to Hunt, sold among the Hazlitt papers at Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge’s, in the late autumn of 1893, complains bitterly of kind Basil Montagu, who had once put off a proffered visit from Hazlitt, on the ground that a party of other guests was expected. The deterred one was naturally wroth. “Yet after this, I am not to look at him a little _in abstracto_! This is what has soured me and made me sick of friendship and acquaintanceship.” Hazlitt confounded cause and effect. He was unwelcome in general gatherings where his genius was unappreciated; and we may be sure Montagu was sorry for it when, in the interests of concord, he held up so deprecating and inhospitable a hand. But among those who nursed Hazlitt in his last illness, Basil Montagu was not the least loyal.
[67] _The Fight_ appeared in the _New Monthly Magazine_ in 1822. It was itself antedated by _The Fancy_ of John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats’s friend and Hood’s brother-in-law, which was printed in 1820. The jolly iambics are as inspired as the essay. “P. C.” is, of course, Pugilistic Club.
“Oh, it is life! to see a proud And dauntless man step, full of hopes, Up to the P. C. stakes and ropes, Throw in his hat, and with a spring Get gallantly within the ring; Eye the wide crown, and walk awhile Taking all cheerings with a smile; To see him strip; his well-trained form, White, glowing, muscular, and warm, All beautiful in conscious power, Relaxed and quiet, till the hour; His glossy and transparent frame, In radiant plight to strive for fame! To look upon the clean shap’d limb In silk and flannel clothèd trim; While round the waist the kerchief tied Makes the flesh glow in richer pride. ’Tis more than life to watch him hold His hand forth, tremulous yet bold, Over his second’s, and to clasp His rival’s in a quiet grasp; To watch the noble attitude He takes, the crowd in breathless mood; And then to see, with adamant start, The muscles set, and the great heart Hurl a courageous splendid light Into the eye, and then—the FIGHT!”
But this is general: Hazlitt is specific. His particular Fight was the great one between Neate of Bristol and Tom Hickman the Gasman, Neate being the victor. On May 20, 1823, Neate met Spring of Hertfordshire (so translated out of his natural patronymic of Winter), in a contest for the championship, and Neate himself went under. This latter battle was mock-heroically celebrated by Maginn in _Blackwood’s_, and Hood’s casual meteorological simile heaped up honors on the winner:
“The Spring! I shrink and shudder at her name. For why? I find her breath a bitter blighter, And suffer from her blows as if they came From Spring the fighter!”
So that literature may be said to have set close to the ropes in those days, from first to last.
[68] Lamb, in “_A Letter to R. Southey, Esq._”
[69] The man of Martial’s epigram had other “views.” The capital translation is Dr. Goldwin Smith’s:
“Vacerra lauds no living poet’s lays, But for departed genius keeps his praise. I, alas, live; nor deem it worth my while To die, that I may win Vacerra’s smile.”
[70] This was the spirit of Henry Fielding on his last voyage, hoisted aboard among the watermen at Redcliffe, and hearing his emaciated body made the subject of jeers and laughter. “No man who knew me,” he writes in his journal, “will think I conceived any personal resentment at this behavior; but it was a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity in the nature of man which I have often contemplated with concern, and which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy thoughts.” It is a fine passage, and a strong heart, not given to boasting, penned it. Poor Hazlitt could not bear even an unintentional slight without imputing diabolical malice to the offender. Yet it was certainly true that, in his saner hours, he could suffer personal discomfort in public without flinching, and deplore the habit which imposed it, rather than the act.
[71] If Hazlitt conveyed some of his best mannerisms from Coleridge, not always transmuting them, surely the balance may be said to be even when one discovers later in Hartley Coleridge such an easy inherited use of Hazlitt’s “flail of gold” as is exemplified in this summary of Roger Ascham’s career. “There was a primitive honesty, a kindly innocence about this good old scholar, which gave a personal interest to the homeliest details of his life. He had the rare felicity of passing through the worst of times without persecution and without dishonor. He lived with princes and princesses, prelates and diplomatists, without offence as without ambition. Though he enjoyed the smiles of royalty, his heart was none the worse, and his fortunes little the better.”