'
He has told us, in many places, of his difficulty in learning how
to write.
He has told us, in many places, of his difficulty in learning how
to write.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v12
Like many a radical of his day, he believed that
there his ideals of liberty would become a reality. His three
years in America present shifting scenes ending in disappoint-
ment and a determination that his family should return to
England. In the following winter (1787–8), the father was
called to the little church at Wem, near Shrewsbury. For more
than a quarter of a century, the Hazlitts lived in this remote
village. Most of the years between the age of ten and twenty-
two, young William spent at Wem. So far, there is little indi-
cation of what the future had in keeping for the son of the poor,
obscure, dissenting minister. The diary written by his sister
Margaret in America attests his delight in the long walks across
country with his father in Massachusetts. Numerous references
in his essays describe with enthusiasm the pleasure which he found
in walking with his father in the country about Wem and in talking
on metaphysical subjects.
The other influence which seems with increasing years to have
grown into a passion is the impression of nature upon him. His
## p. 166 (#190) ############################################
166
[CH.
Hazlitt
eye was ever turned out of the window. In his own garden at
Wem, he watched with a sympathy akin to Thoreau's 'the broccoli
plants and kidney beans of his own rearing. His tramps led him
into all parts of Shropshire, to Peterborough, and into Wales.
Nature was company enough' for him. Although he afterwards
wrote much and well about books, he always associated everything
with outdoor life-books which he had read, churches or pictures
which he had seen, people whom he had met. Even the battles of
Napoleon had such associations :
On the same day the news of the battle of Austerlitz came; I walked out
in the afternoon and, as I returned, saw the evening star set over a poor man's
cottage with other thoughts and feelings than I shall ever have again.
He struggled long and hard to find himself and his place in the
world. When he was fifteen, he was sent by his father to the
nonconformist theological seminary at Hackney. There, he found
a deal of metaphysics to his liking, and, also, soon discovered
that the ministry was not to be his calling. Fortunately for him,
his brother John was a portrait-painter in London working under
the direction of Sir Joshua Reynolds. To his brother's studio,
William made frequent visits and became enamoured of the pro-
fession of painting. He was more than ever in doubt what to do.
After an unsuccessful year at school, he returned to Wem. He could
not preach, he would like to paint, he wished to write but could not.
'I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless like a worm by the
wayside. ' One day, in 1796, he found a copy of Burke's Letter to a
Noble Lord. For the first time, he felt what it must be to write,
'to be able to convey the slightest conception of my meaning to
others in words. ' Then, a new light shone into his soul. He met
Coleridge, heard him preach, walked and talked with him and was
invited to visit him at Nether Stowey and to meet Wordsworth.
What this meant for Hazlitt he has described, with the charm of a
poet, in My First Acquaintance with Poets, one of the finest
essays in the language. As if from a dream, the young man of
twenty arose with a resolution that the greatest discouragements
could not shake off. Not quite ready to give up painting, he
spent a little while with his brother in London. He crossed to
the Louvre, where, for several months, he made copies of the
masters for friends at home and actually went about in northern
England painting portraits of his father, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Lamb and others. Then, his career as a painter came abruptly to
a close. Nothing remained for him but to write.
1
## p. 167 (#191) ############################################
VII]
167
His Later Life
>
Like the careers of the other romantic essayists of the period,
Hazlitt's life presents nothing of thrilling interest. We know
little about it, aside from references in his essays, in the interesting
diary of Crabb Robinson and in the letters of Charles and Mary
Lamb. He became a friend of the most notable people in
London ; above all, he was always welcome at the rooms of the
Lambs. He has left us the best description of one of their Wednes-
day evenings. Unfortunately, he came to know a certain Sarah
Stoddart, a friend of Mary Lamb. After an unromantic court-
ship, they were married in 1808, with Charles Lamb as one of the
four witnesses. Charles wrote ominously to Southey, 'I was at
Hazlitt's marriage and had like to have been turned out several
times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. '
After the wedding, the Hazlitts moved to Sarah's cottage at
Winterslow, a little village about six miles from Salisbury. For
about three years they lived at Winterslow, and afterwards, for
brief periods, Hazlitt repaired thither to obtain some of the
seclusion which contributed largely to his best writing. To neither
of the two persons was the union agreeable, and they planned to
go together to Scotland to obtain a divorce. A second marriage,
with a Mrs Bridgewater, proved a mere episode in his life and
seemed to confirm the opinion held by his friends that at least
Hazlitt's temper was not conducive to a life of marital happiness.
Twenty-five years were allotted to Hazlitt for his life-work.
In that short span, he succeeded in making his way to fame from
absolute obscurity, without the prestige of family or wealth, with
no formal education and no friends of influence. This he achieved
at a time when there were many men of Titanic mould. He won
distinction as a lecturer ; his criticisms on books, pictures and
plays were widely read; he became known as one of the best
talkers and he was the target of the invectives of some of the
cleverest, as well as the most brutal, of the reviewers in the leading
magazines.
The writings of Hazlitt have recently been collected by A. R.
Waller and Arnold Glover and published in twelve large, closely
printed volumes, in all about six thousand pages. Not many
of us would wish to read all these pages. Some of his writing
is forced and superficial, notably his essays on philosophy; some
is unpleasant, for example, the sentimental record of his passion
for the stupid servant girl in Liber Amoris; some is bitter and
full of prejudice; but, withal, there is much, very much, that is
fine, so fine that William Ernest Henley only yesterday could
## p. 168 (#192) ############################################
168
[ch.
Hazlitt
6
6
say, 'Hazlitt is ever Hazlitt; and at his highest moments Hazlitt
is hard to beat, and has not these many years been beaten. '
In whatever he did he was an enthusiast. The same gusto
which, as a boy, he had shown in his discussions with his father, he
displayed in his reading of philosophy and in his first attempt
(Essay on the Principles of Human Action, 1805) to elucidate
the systems of Hartley and Helvetius. He liked to cherish his
experiences : books that he had read, plays which he had seen,
pictures that he had admired. He liked to discuss abstract
propositions while he walked alone in the country, trying to
'forget the town and all that is in it. He liked to tell what he
liked and, above everything, be liked to try to say things in his
own way. And he succeeded so well that Stevenson, who admired
him ungrudgingly, once said of him, “We are all mighty fine
fellows, but none of us can write like Hazlitt. Certainly, it was,
for him, better to travel than to arrive'; else, it would be difficult
to understand how a man so widely hated, so bitterly attacked,
so much alone, could say on his death-bed : 'Well, I have had a
happy life. '
The subjects of his lectures or essays on authors and their
works include almost every name worth knowing in English
literature from Chaucer to Hazlitt's own day-men of varied
literary attainment of the Elizabethan era, wits of the restoration,
comic writers, dramatists, poets, novelists of the eighteenth
century and almost all his contemporaries.
When we consider that he did not have the guides and hand-
books of today which tell us dogmatically what to like and how to
appreciate the masterpieces of English literature, we get a better
understanding of the range and variety of these criticisms. He
had had almost no formal training, he knew little of ancient
classical literature in the original languages; but, somehow, in his
goings to and fro, he had laid hold of some of the great books of
the world and he had read them well : perhaps he knew Shake-
speare best, Montaigne was his model essayist and he knew
something of Le Sage, Rabelais, Rousseau, Boccaccio, Cervantes,
Goethe and Schiller. Among English writers, his favourites were
Spenser, Milton, Congreve, Swift, Arbuthnot, Burke, Fielding,
Richardson and Scott.
If his preparation for the task of a literary critic seems not
what we should expect today, certainly we are surprised how well
he succeeded in appraising the best English literature. Perhaps
his greatest service to his time was the attention which he
## p. 169 (#193) ############################################
VII]
Hazlitt as a Critic
169
directed to Shakespeare. Chagrined by the lack of intelligent
English criticism of Shakespeare, he praised without reserve
A. W. Schlegel for his sympathetic interpretation and set to
work to discuss each play with a gusto that has never been
excelled. Heine stated that, up to his time, Hazlitt's was the
best comment on Shakespeare. Perhaps his criticism lacked the
profoundness and philosophical insight of Coleridge and the
affectionate appreciation of Lamb, but it is more inclusive than
either. For the reader of today who wishes to read the plays of
Shakespeare with unadulterated enjoyment, not deviating into
dogmatic assertion or scientific research, Hazlitt is a sure guide.
His series of comments on Shakespeare's plays and characters is a
challenge to the reader to turn again to the scenes where he will
find something new in an old familiar passage. We can be certain
that Hazlitt has not led us into a waste of philological or philo-
sophical speculation. He does not put himself between Shakespeare
and ourselves but helps us to know Shakespeare better as a poet
and as a dramatist who saw life from many angles.
Likewise, the other dramatists of Shakespeare's day and
writers of prose receive most intelligent appreciation. Perhaps
the best of his critical work is the clear and discriminating
interpretation of the spirit of the Elizabethan age. Sifting the
gold from the dross, he sets in proper place the men and forces
which made the era great. In his discussion of seventeenth
century writers, he sounds surprisingly modern. His regard for
Milton, Bunyan, Sir Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor does not
show the same degree of devotion as does Lamb's quaint imitation
of them, but his judgment of their work as literature is certainly
more to be trusted by the reader who desires to view English
literature in its true perspective. Like many of his successors,
Hazlitt found the eighteenth century interesting in its virility, and
his preferences are amazingly supported by the best judgment of
today. He appreciated intelligently the forceful simplicity of
eighteenth century style and inherited the best qualities of that
style. He displayed genius in his ability to discern what was
real beneath the formality and affectation of eighteenth century
manners. His criticism of Pope, whom most of his contemporaries
did not understand, shows with what intelligence he recognised
Pope as the poet of art in contrast with Shakespeare the poet
of nature. He extolled the eloquence of Burke and urged re-
peatedly that here was the finest model for the expression, in
prose, of imaginative feeling.
## p. 170 (#194) ############################################
170
[CH.
Hazlitt
Hazlitt's criticism of his contemporaries in The Spirit of the
Age is in accord with his courageous position on all questions.
That he should sit in judgment on his own friends seemed to
him as natural as that he should speak out what he thought of
writers long since dead. It was inevitable that the personal esti-
mate should play a part here; but it is remarkable how a full
century accepts his verdict. To be sure, there are bits of ill-
temper and personal prejudice, but there is so much which is
sound and genuine that it is safe to say that these essays are
almost the last of Hazlitt's writings which the student of English
literature would surrender. The particular essays show the
fighting qualities of a man who was animated with fiery courage,
whom Gifford and the whole pack of hostile reviewers found a
most worthy antagonist. What he thought most worthy we still
admire, Coleridge, Cobbett, Scott, the greatest and wisest' of the
novelists, Wordsworth, 'the most original poet now living. We
do not hate all that he hated, but what he loved we find is most
deserving of our love.
To his envious contemporaries, who taunted him with a lack of
reading which, they affirmed, was displayed by the frequent re-
currence of the same quotation in his essays, he said,
I have been found fault with for repeating myself and for a narrow range
of ideas. To a want of general reading I plead guilty and am sorry for it
but perhaps if I had read more I might have thought less.
Perhaps that was an easy way to excuse himself; but it is true
that he tried most earnestly to cultivate the habit of thinking, and
detested nothing so much as servile imitation. He wished to
think and feel for himself. If he did not drink deep, he was an
expert taster. He wrote as he would have talked, guided by
an unusually catholic sympathy. No one literary form or period,
author or group of writers blinded him to the enjoyment of the
long sweep of varied literary expression. He had not sworn
allegiance to any school. Without historical or scientific equip-
ment, he was possessed of a rare faculty for describing a literary
movement and putting his finger on the central and impelling
force. For the mere dates of an author's life or mere linguistic
details, he had little interest. His enjoyment of Hamlet, Lear,
Othello, was not affected by any questions of textual uncertainty
or priority of composition. To him, it was sufficient that here
was poetry of a high order, that here was something that made
him glad to be alive.
An important contribution of Hazlitt is his comment on the
## p. 171 (#195) ############################################
VII)
171
Hazlitt's Dramatic Criticism
stage, largely included in A Review of the English Stage; or, A
Series of Dramatic Criticisms (1818, 1821). His first continuous
employment was on The Morning Chronicle, in 1813, for which he
wrote his first dramatic criticism, and, save for a few unimportant
things by Leigh Hunt, the first of its kind in our literature.
Later, he wrote for The Examiner, The Champion, The Times
and, finally, The London Magazine. These hundred or more of
articles include much interesting discussion of the theatres, plays
and actors of his time. His visits took him to Drury lane, Covent
garden, The Haymarket, The Lyceum, The King's, Surrey, The
Adelphi, The Coburg, The Aquatic and The East London. He wrote
of all the plays of Shakespeare, of those of the restoration and the
eighteenth century which were still given and of the first perform-
ances of plays of his own time. He described winter and summer
plays, pantomimes, operas and oratorios. He has left the best
account of the actors and actresses whom he saw, the Kembles, Kean,
Macready, Booth, Bannister, Miss Stephens, Mrs Siddons, as well
as sketches of others of whom we now know only the names. As
with his appreciation of literature, Hazlitt was not a formal critic
of the drama and theatre. His taste was formed under the
direction of his feelings. He wrote of the drama with gusto, not
because it was a great literary form made illustrious by Shake-
speare, possessed of formal technique and of a brilliant history, but
because he liked to go to the play to see the happy faces in the
pit,' to watch the actors in their parts and then, enriched by the
happy experiences of the evening, to go home to think it all over.
We like the stage because we like to talk about ourselves. We
do not like any person or persons who do not like plays. ' His
criticism is the vivid record of these impressions. He watched
closely the entrances and exits of the actors, their eyes, faces,
hands, listened to the cadences of the spoken sentences, and
marked the differences in an actor on successive evenings. Rarely
did he analyse a play as a formal composition, nor was he much
interested in the technique of the verse. The fine speeches held
him and the varying gales of passion, as they sweep the characters
into this or that extremity. A drama was something to be played,
and his comments took the form of personal descriptions of
Kemble as Sir Giles Overreach, Miss O'Neill as Lady Teazle,
Mrs Siddons as Lady Macbeth, Macready as Othello, or Kean as
lago, Shylock or Richard III.
In this field, he was a pioneer and his writings mark an epoch
in the history of theatrical criticism. Before his day, honest
6
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## p. 172 (#196) ############################################
172
[ch.
Hazlitt
reviews of plays were unknown. Leigh Hunt had seen the oppor-
tunity and had introduced the new department in The Examiner,
but his imprisonment and that of his brother on account of
libellous publications had prevented the continuance of this phase
of their work. Not only was Hazlitt the first to give attention to
dramatic criticism, but he was, also, without special training for
this form of writing. He had always liked to go to the play and,
in the years of his closest intimacy with Charles Lamb, had spent
many evenings in the different London theatres. His fondness for
the theatre and his natural zest in human action were a sufficient
preparation for him in any work which required the power of
observation and of vivid description. As a critic of the stage, he
conceived it to be his duty to be fair to the actor and to the
public. We doubt if he allowed himself to express an opinion
which he did not sincerely hold, or indulge in praise or blame
which he thought not deserved.
Though I do not repent of what I have said in praise of certain actors,
yet I wish I could retract what I had been obliged to say in reprobation of
actors. . . . I never understood that the applauded actor thought himself
personally obliged to the newspaper critic; the latter was merely supposed
to do his duty.
a
As a boy and as a young man, Hazlitt loved pictures. To him,
they were the reflection of what was beautiful in nature. It will
be remembered that he tried to become a painter and turned aside
from that profession only when he recognised that he could not be
equal to any one of his ideal painters, Claude, Rembrandt, Titian
or Raphael. He wrote once, 'I am a slave to the picturesque,' and
so he was. In the face of nature, he saw the charm of line and
colour, and his essays abound in passages that could only have
been written by one who was sensitive to those effects of landscape
which the painter sees. Doubtless, he had some skill of hand, for
his brother and friends encouraged him to become a painter, but
he felt that, in this work, he could not succeed, and, therefore,
would not try. Happily for English literature, however, he
knew much about painting from his conversations with Flaxman,
Haydon and Northcote and his reading of Sir Joshua Reynolds
and Jonathan Richardson, and equipped with this knowledge,
he turned from painting to writing about pictures.
It is safe to say that no essayist, contemporary with him, was
his equal in natural aptitude or in knowledge of what the painter
was trying to achieve, although he never really fashioned his ideas
into a system. As in his other criticism, he was an enthusiast
## p. 173 (#197) ############################################
VII] Hazlitt's Writings on Art 173
depending upon the turn taken by his personal impressions. One
requirement only he insisted upon : that “art must be true to
nature. ' By this, he meant no mere photographic reproduction,
but an interpretation of nature by the artist, expressed in such a
way that the picture conveyed a meaning. So, he never thought
of praising mere technical excellence. The canvasses of his beloved
Claude, Titian, Rembrandt were more than mere delineations, they
were allied to poetry, each expressing, in its own beautiful form,
the meaning of life, an emanation of the moral and intellectual
part of our nature, as well as of the sensitive.
In his appreciation of painting, he tried, above everything else,
to be honest with himself. He did not lack the courage to say
what he honestly felt or saw.
Before Ruskin was born, he wrote:
'In landscape Turner has shown a knowledge of the effects of air
and of powerful relief in objects which was never surpassed. ' He
was not less ready to praise rising young artists, such as Haydon
and Wilson, than he was to join in the universal approbation of such
masters as Claude, Poussin, Rembrandt or Titian. And he would
as readily indicate what he regarded as faults in the masters as
praise the excellence of artists hitherto unknown. If he got no
further than an expression of his feelings, at any rate he said
what he liked, not because it was the fashion to like a certain
picture or because he found it starred in a guide-book, but because
he liked it.
My taste in pictures is, I believe, very different from that of rich and
princely collectors. . . . I should like to have a few pictures hung round the
room that speak to me with well-known looks, that touch some string of
memory, not a number of varnished, smooth, glittering gew-gawe.
Like some other writers of the romantic period, he contributed
little or nothing to a philosophical discussion of the arts. Ever
since the wonderful day when he acted as guide to Charles and Mary
Lamb through the gallery of Blenheim, he has been an inspiration
to the layman who has wished to cultivate a liking for good
pictures. At a time when few people were allowed to see famous
paintings in English galleries, Hazlitt described these pictures
for his readers vividly and rapturously, before Ruskin's sympa-
thetic criticism, with its imaginative descriptions of pictures and
buildings, made people see more in the world that lay about them.
That his work had a serious result is attested by Gosse, who, in
the introduction to his edition of Hazlitt's Conversations of James
Northcote, says: ‘he claimed for painting the identity of a branch
## p. 174 (#198) ############################################
174
[CH.
Hazlitt
of literature and expended on it the wealth of his ever-fervid and
impassioned imagination. '
For the majority of readers, the most interesting part of
Hazlitt's work is to be found in his miscellaneous essays.
.
Like his most worthy contemporaries, Lamb, De Quincey, Words-
worth, Byron, Shelley, he set forth his personal experiences
and his personal prejudices. Here, then, we come nearest to the
real man Hazlitt. To repeat the lines which he frequently quoted,
he liked
To pour out all as plain
As downright Shippen or as old Montaigne.
The best of Hazlitt, then, is to be found in such essays as
My First Acquaintance with Poets, On Going a Journey, The
Feeling of Immortality in Youth, On Reading Old Books, On
Reading New Books, Of Persons One Would Wish to have seen,
On the Fear of Death, On Disagreeable People, On Taste, On
Familiar Style, The Sick Chamber, The Fight. After everything
has been sifted, Hazlitt is to be judged by these essays, and, doubt-
less, he would be willing to have it so.
On one occasion, he wrote, “I have not written a line that licks
the dust. Incidents of his early life had kept burning the fires
of independence and courageous expression. Born in a family
known for its hearty acceptance of the views of dissent, he had
grown up in close association with his father, with whom he
enjoyed discussion upon the most abstract subjects. To the ideals
of his youth he had clung tenaciously and he had shunned the
appearance of deserting the cause of republicanism or liberty in
any form. His first published composition was a letter to The
Shrewsbury Chronicle (1791), in which he stood out for fair treat-
ment of Priestley, whose house had been burned by a mob in
Birmingham. He did not follow the judgments of English critics,
neither was he held in thrall by the thought of Germany or
France. He wished to see and feel things for himself. This spirit
of independence, sometimes blinded by ill-temper or bitter re-
sentment, was always asserting itself, whether in championing the
cause of a new actor, in praising an aspiring young painter, in
giving a new turn to an old definition or in holding at bay the pack
of reviewers whose numbers made them bold to attack a superior
antagonist. He was born not to be a coward. He was a good
fighter. Although he often found himself in a minority of one,
he
found enjoyment in the feeling that he was right according to
his abstract principles.
## p. 175 (#199) ############################################
VII]
His Models
175
For us, the most interesting result of this independence is his
resolution not to be satisfied with anything short of his best in
writing. Two fine examples always stood before him-Montaigne,
who may be said to have been the first to say as an author what
he felt as a man,' and Burke, who ‘poured out his mind on paper.
'
He has told us, in many places, of his difficulty in learning how
to write.
6
Oh, how little do they know who have never done anything but repeat
after others by rote, the labor, the yearnings and misgivings of mind it costs
to get the germ of an original idea, to dig it out of the hidden recesses of
thought and nature and to bring it half-ashamed, struggling, and deformed
into the day-to give words and intelligible symbols to that which was never
imagined or expressed before.
That he succeeded to an unusual degree in his ambition is now
a matter of record. Coleridge wrote of him that he said things
in his own way. His vigorous mind, seriously given to thinking,
would not be satisfied with expression that fell short of his con-
ception of clearness. He was not content with the homely
simplicity of Defoe, or the intellectual force of Swift: he aspired to
succeed, as Burke had succeeded, in conveying something of the
beauty and eloquence of truth and nature. What he wrote must
express all the shades of his sensitive imagination. It is not strange,
then, that he knew the meaning of words and strove unceasingly
to get the proper word for the proper place. The ephemeral
word or phrase found no place in his style, nor was he given to
coining words or to transplanting foreign words. Conse-
quently, his diction is remarkable for its purity. How well
he made the standard English vocabulary serve his purpose may
be found in his description of The Fight, where he does not feel
the need of adopting the slang of the ring to give a thrilling
account of an exciting contest. It is interesting to contrast this
passage with De Quincey's Murder as one of the Fine Arts. Not
only did he search for the right word but he strove for conciseness
in so far as the language would convey all that he wished to say.
'I hate to see a load of band-boxes go along the street, and I hate
to see a parcel of big words without anything in them. '
Hazlitt seems never to have been without the word which
would express with directness and vividness what was in his mind.
That he could parry as with a rapier, William Gifford must have
learned to his discomfort while he read the celebrated Letter.
De Quincey called his style 'abrupt, insulated, capricious, and
. . . non-sequacious. ' There is a sense in which this is true. For
-
## p. 176 (#200) ############################################
176
[CH.
Hazlitt
a time, the thought seems not to move. It is thrown into the
air like balls by a juggler, and we catch reflections of it, and
are thrilled and excited to pleasure in watching. One happy
phrase after another-an old quotation in a new setting, a
flash of sentiment, a bit of keen perceiving, a wise observation
on life—all thrown together, carry us on with a rapidity and a
stateliness that are not excelled in English literature.
The opening passage of his essay on poetry illustrates the
movement of his expository writing. Here, we have Hazlitt
thinking with overflowing zest upon a subject which was life to
him. Because he is trying to write something on a subject
which every critic or poet has discussed does not embarrass him.
As a man of feeling, who cannot reduce poetry to mere formal
words, he pours himself out with the richness and seriousness of
the most unabashed romanticist.
Or we may turn to his essay, The Feeling of Immortality
in Youth, to the passage beginning 'To see the golden sun, and
the azure sky. Observe the gusto with which he follows the
'
thought until he is actually out of breath. Here is the elaborate
stateliness of Sir Thomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor without the
quaintness of the seventeenth century which allured Charles
Lamb. In outline, it is formal and imposing; in meaning, it is
concrete, vivid and personal.
The virility of his enthusiasm is best shown in his delight in
outdoor life. No writer of today, after a century given to the
study and enjoyment of open air life, writes of it with greater zest
and more consistent inspiration. His essay, On Going a Journey,
is a pleasure to all lovers of Stevenson and Thoreau.
In many respects, the most memorable piece of writing of
William Hazlitt is the essay to which he has given the attractive
title, My First Acquaintance with Poets, one of the fine, immortal
essays in our language. The young man of twenty meets in
1798 the philosopher Coleridge and the poet Wordsworth. The
man of forty looks back through the glamour of the intervening
years and breaks forth with lyric enthusiasm at the thought of
these rich experiences.
In these essays, we have some of the best of Hazlitt-an
expression which is concrete, vivid, personal, vigorous ; the voice
of a manly and courageous seeker after truth, who sees nothing
inconsistent in the combination of truth and sentiment, truth and
beauty.
Hazlitt's habit of repeated quotation has caused irritation to
## p. 177 (#201) ############################################
VII]
His Quotations
177
>
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many readers. He used innumerable quotations, consisting of a
mere phrase or of many lines, whenever he desired. If they do not
serve him as they stand, he does not hesitate to change a word or
phrase or to join two or more quotations together. He took supreme
pleasure in an apt phrase, whether of his own coinage or whether
he had picked it up long before in some source which he had taken
no pains to remember. He sought justification in the manner in
which he made his quotations convey his own ideas. Some of the
lines which he liked best to quote are here given as he wrote
them. Our life is of mingled yarn, good and ill together,' 'holds
the mirror up to nature,' 'web of our life,' 'too much i’ the sun,'
comes home to the business of men,' 'the stuff of which our life
is made,' sees into the life of things,' ever in the haunch of
winter sings,' 'fate, fore-will, foreknowledge absolute,’ ‘come like
shadows, so depart,' 'at one proud swoop,' with all its giddy
raptures,' 'the witchery of the soft blue sky,' 'it smiled and it
was cold,' sounding on his way,''men's minds are parcel of their
fortunes. ' A glance at this list will show the preponderance of
.
quotations from Shakespeare. These he applied everywhere and
in every possible connection. Next after Shakespeare, as sources,
come Milton, the Bible, Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Cowper,
Rousseau, Sterne, Fielding, Wordsworth. He had not the slightest
reluctance to appropriate a phrase that he liked in any book
which he read.
One characteristic marks his style especially, his use of the
parallel construction and contrast. He liked to join his subjects
in pairs; for example, Cant and Hypocrisy, Wit and Humour,
Past and Future, Thought and Action, Genius and Common
Sense, Patronage and Puffing, Writing and Speaking and so on
ad infinitum. So, he was much accustomed to discussing his
subject with the aid of contrast, as Wilkie and Hogarth, Shake-
speare and Jonson, Chaucer and Spenser, Voltaire and Swift,
Thomson and Cowper, Addison and Steele, Gray and Collins,
Dryden and Pope. In this particular, he had an influence upon
modern literary criticism, which has often used this means of
defining the relative importance of English writers.
Some readers, nourished on the fare of the Victorians, have
objected to Hazlitt on the ground that his writing shows mere
feeling and no moral purpose. Certainly, one does not think of
him as a inoralist with a message like Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, or
Browning, yet he, like all great English writers, was guided by
certain principles and was consistently true to certain ideals.
12
E. L. XII.
CH. VII.
## p. 178 (#202) ############################################
178
[CH.
Hazlitt
-
Hazlitt was as bitter against affectation and insipidity as Carlyle
or Thackeray. Not more insistently than he, did Carlyle try to get
beneath mere clothes and separate the symbol from the thing.
Ruskin had no more genuine love of nature and saw not more clearly
than Hazlitt the relation between life and the beauty of nature.
In his efforts to think clearly upon life and to express himself with
classic simplicity, there is a suggestion of Matthew Arnold. In
his virility of expression and the hopefulness with which he wrote
in continued adversity, we find something that suggests the
optimism of Browning and Stevenson. Though he was not a
moralist according to the general meaning of that word, he never
turned from the serious problem of life. He was no shallow
optimist or railing pessimist. There is, throughout his writing, an
abiding faith in human nature, a devotion to beauty and an
allegiance to ideals of square-dealing, honesty and truthfulness,
that made his life happy when those who looked on-all save one-
called him of all men most lonely and miserable.
The influence of Hazlitt has been pervasive through the nine-
teenth century. Among his contemporaries, there were those who
would have nothing to do with his idols, Rousseau and Napoleon,
who did not share his radical views on politics, who despised his
enthusiastic style as mere sentimental twaddle. On the other
hand, there were those who, like Leigh Hunt, Lamb, Coleridge and
De Quincey, recognised, in some measure, the worth of the man.
Certain of the reviewers in the magazines, though they took delight
in abusing him personally, had good cause for admiring his literary
skill when they were the objects of his invective. Among the
great writers of English since his day, he has found many admirers
and imitators, many who have followed his lead in his appreciation
of art and of literature. Macaulay had a fondness for the same
balanced structure, the same tendency toward epigrammatic ex-
pression, the same persistent determination to write with unmis-
takable clearness. Newman's style bore ample testimony to the
eloquence which Hazlitt displayed in his most stately writing.
Thackeray wrote heartily in admiration :
1
Hazlitt was one of the keenest and brightest critics that ever lived.
With partialities and prejudices innumerable, he had a wit so keen, a
sensibility so exquisite, an appreciation of humour or pathos or even of the
greatest act so lively, quick and cultivated, that it was always good to know
what were the impressions made by books or men or pictures on such a
inind; and that, as there were not probably a dozen men in England with
powers so varied, all the rest of the world might be rejoiced to listen to the
opinions of this accomplished critic.
## p. 179 (#203) ############################################
vii]
179
Henley on Hazlitt
In similar vein wrote Froude, Bagehot, Lowell, Stevenson
and many other worthy judges of our best literature. Perhaps
the surest comment which indicates the estimate of today is by
William Ernest Henley in the concluding paragraph of his in-
troduction to the complete edition of Hazlitt's works, already
cited:
:
As a writer, therefore, it is with Lamb that I would bracket him: they
are dissimilars, but they go gallantly and naturally together-par nobile
fratrum. Give us these two, with some ripe Cobbett, a volume of Southey,
some Wordsworth, certain pages of Shelley, a great deal of the Byron who
wrote letters, and we get the right prose of the time. The best of it all,
perhaps, is the best of Lamb. But Hazlitt's, for different qualities, is so
imminent and shining a second that I hesitate as to the pre-eminency.
Probably the race is Lamb's. But Hazlitt is ever Hazlitt; and at his
highest moments Hazlitt is hard to beat, and has not these many years
been beaten.
1242
## p. 180 (#204) ############################################
CHAPTER VIII
LAMB
By reason of its intimate nature and the colour which it took
from the personal events of his life, the work of Charles Lamb is
inseparable from the circumstances in which it came into being.
This is peculiarly true of more than one of the great writers of
the early nineteenth century. The biographies of Byron, Shelley
,
and Coleridge are necessary complements to the understanding
of their poetry. But, in none of these three cases is a succession
of incidents so closely interwoven in prose and poetry as is the
more peaceful life of Lamb in his writings. Those writings, inspired
by the influence of the moment and by a lively remembrance of
the past, take their place in the course of a story on which they
form a running comment; and it is this story, chequered by the
presence of sorrow and tragedy and beautified by the endurance
of high human affection, which has given Lamb a special place
in literary history. His genius matured in submission to its
.
influence: the experience of daily life was the source of the
sympathy with humanity which pervades his style and lends to it
an abiding charm.
Lamb's statement that his father came from Lincoln has never
been proved positively, but is probably an exception to his usual
habit of embroidering fiction upon fact. John Lamb, whose
characteristics are known to us from his son's affectionate portrait
of Lovel, 'a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty,' with
'a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to resemble,
was clerk and general factotum to Samuel Salt of the Inner
Temple. The father, 'as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you
could desire,' gave some proof of literary talent in a small volume
entitled Poetical Pieces on Several Occasions, the best of which,
an amusing description of the daily routine of a lady's footman,
was probably drawn from his own early experience. He married
Elizabeth Field, a member of a family of Hertfordshire farmers.
1
## p. 181 (#205) ############################################
CH. VIII]
School-days
181
They lived in Salt's house at 2 Crown office row, in the Inner
Temple, Mrs Lamb acting as housekeeper. Their eldest son,
John, described by Lamb as James Elia, was born in June 1763.
Mary Lamb was the second child, born in December 1764.
Charles, the youngest, was born on 10 February 1775. Four other
children, two boys and two girls, died in infancy.
Salt's house in the Temple was Lamb's home for the first
seventeen years of his life. Here, Mary Lamb, ten years his
senior,
1764. serviving
was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old
English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will
upon that fair and wholesome pasturage.
>
In the quiet courts and ‘bricky towres' of the Temple, close to,
yet aloof from, streaming London's central roar,' Lamb learned
to survey the ways of the world about him with sympathetic
observation, and to interpret them in their true proportions with
an amused delight at their variety and movement. London,
‘itself a pantomime and masquerade,' early enveloped him with
its attraction. 'I often shed tears in the motley Strand,' he wrote
to Wordsworth in 1801, ‘from fulness of joy at so much life. ' To
Manning and to Robert Lloyd, his praise of his native city is
equally lyric, and, throughout life, London continued to supply
his imagination with material upon which it readily worked its
fantasies.
Lamb learned reading and writing at a day-school in Fetter
lane, kept by one William Bird, which he attended with his sister
and afterwards described in Captain Starkey, one of the essays
contributed to Hone's Every-Day Book. In October 1782, he
entered Christ's hospital, having been presented to the foundation
by one of the governors, a friend of Samuel Salt. His recollections
of the seven years spent here are embodied in an essay printed in
The Gentleman's Magazine for June 1813, and in the more famous
essay in which he blended his own experiences with the less happy
memories of his contemporary Coleridge. The friendship with
Coleridge, begun at Christ's hospital, lasted, with one short break,
throughout their lives. In a famous apostrophe, touched with
that sense of regret for wasted energy and unfulfilled hope which
Coleridge's later career naturally inspired, Lamb has recorded his
admiration for the precocious genius of his friend. Coleridge,
equally affectionate but less alive to reality, has characterised
Lamb as the 'gentle-hearted Charles' Gentle-hearted as he was
## p. 182 (#206) ############################################
182
[ch.
Lamb
a
in the best sense of the word, Lamb resented the epithet, and,
in fact, he was made of sterner stuff than Coleridge and proved
his capacity to face the facts of a world which, to the poet and
philosopher, was an unsubstantial vision.
In estimating the influence of early memories and friendships
upon Lamb's work, it is impossible to overlook his connection
with his mother's native county Hertford. His grandmother,
Mrs Field, was housekeeper at Blakesware, a large country house
in the parish of Widford, four miles east of Ware. The Plumers,
its owners, lived principally at Gilston, some miles away, and left
Blakesware in charge of Mrs Field. Charles and Mary Lamb
spent many holidays here, roaming freely through the deserted
mansion. In the autumn of 1799, Lamb revisited the place and
wrote to Southey of the tapestried bedroom and the old 'marble
hall, with Hogarth’s prints, and the Roman Caesars in marble
hung round,' of the wilderness and the village churchyard by
the park gates, 'where the bones of my honoured grandam lie. '
Mary Lamb described the house and recalled a childish experience
of her own in The Young Mahometan, one of the tales in
Mrs Leicester's School. The power of Blakesware upon Lamb's
growing imagination is drawn in Blakesmoor in H-shire,
where we see him sitting in the window-seat of the store-room,
reading Cowley, wandering through the house and creeping into
the haunted room, “but always in the daytime, with a passion
of fear,' so fascinated by the boundaries of his Eden,' that he
was ignorant of what lay beyond, and fancied the brook which ran
outside the park, ‘half hid by trees,' to be a romantic lake. In
Dream-Children, Blakesware is again described, with its empty
rooms, gardens, orangery and fish-pond ; his grandmother, bowed
down physically with wasting disease but unbowed in spirit, rises
before his memory; he recalls her special affection for his elder
brother John, ‘so handsome and spirited a youth, and a king to
the rest of us. A more shadowy reminiscence is the fair-haired
Alice, who lies buried in Widford churchyard, connected in
thought with the portrait of the Hertfordshire beauty which ‘hung
next the great bay-window' and was the subject of Mary Lamb's
stanzas to 'High-born Helen. ' "The green plains of pleasant
Hertfordshire' supplied a life-long attraction to Lamb, from the
days when, a boy at school, he attempted to trace the New River
to its source, to the long walks of later years, when he roamed
about Enfield or, with Mary Lamb and Barron Field, made his
pilgrimage from St Albans to the home of his relations at
## p. 183 (#207) ############################################
VII] Early Friendships, Mary Lamb 183
9
Mackery End. It was in these quiet byways that he found his
true point of contact with nature; and the placid grace which
dispenses its charm amid the parks and woods, grass-bordered
lanes and open greens, of Hertfordshire is not unlike the tranquil
beauty, never far from poetry, of his prose.
Lamb left Christ's hospital in 1789, and, two years later,
obtained a temporary appointment in the examiner's office in
the South-Sea house, which he held from September 1791 to
February 1792. This dignified establishment, in the unexacting
service of which his brother John spent his life, is described in
the first essay of Elia. In April 1792, he entered a scene of
greater activity in the East India house in Leadenhall street,
where, for thirty-three years, he performed his daily duties. In
this year, Samuel Salt died and the Lamb family left the Temple,
to settle eventually at 7 Little Queen street, Holborn. Between
1792 and 1796, the friendship with Coleridge continued, and
Coleridge fathered Lamb's earliest sonnet, which was printed
under the initials S. T. C. in The Morning Chronicle of 29 December
1794. Bowles, 'genius of the sacred fountain of tears,' was the
inspirer of this and other sonnets, which, by May 1796, had
reached the number of nine. Four of these were published in
Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects in 1796, and another,
addressed to Mary Lamb, is contained in the earliest of the letters
to Coleridge which has been preserved. This sonnet was written
in a lunatic asylum at Hoxton, where Lamb spent the six weeks
at the end of 1795 and the beginning of 1796. There was insanity
in his family, which was soon to declare itself tragically; but
this was the only occasion on which Lamb himself was affected by
it, and the cause which disturbed him so seriously can only be
conjectured. The correspondence with Coleridge, extending from
May 1796 to June 1798, has its moments of playfulness, but is
overcast by the melancholy of one who feels himself solitary.
Old schoolfellows, however, occasionally came to see him, among
them James White, whom he assisted in the authorship of The
Falstaff Letters; and he improved his acquaintance with the
scholarly and unpractical George Dyer, twenty years his elder.
The letters are full of allusions to his reading, chiefly among old
English authors, and contain much criticism of Coleridge's early
verse, especially of Religious Musings, to the fineness, and to the in-
equality, of which Lamb showed himself fully alive. He advocated
unitarianism and expressed admiration for Priestley with a fervour
which, although it declined in later years, gave permanent colour
a
## p. 184 (#208) ############################################
184
[CH.
Lamb
to his religious convictions, so far as we can gain any glimpse
of them.
For a time, however, the consolations of religion were foremost
in his mind. His mother had, for some time, been helpless and
dependent upon the care of her daughter. On 22 September
1796, Mary had a sudden fit of insanity, in which she killed her
mother. She was removed to a private asylum at Islington, and
Charles and his father went to 45 Chapel street, Pentonville.
Sarah Lamb, an aunt who lived with the family, was taken into
the house of a rich relation, but soon returned to her brother and
nephew, dying early in 1797. Lamb, thus, in his twenty-third
year, had 'the whole weight of the family' thrown on him-a
father in his second childhood, a dying aunt and a sister whose
returning reason was liable to fail again at any moment. John, the
elder brother, though possessed of many good qualities, was wrapped
up in his own affairs. It would have been easy to have taken his
advice and consigned Mary permanently to a madhouse; but Charles
preferred to make a home for his sister. During her father's life-
time, rooms were found for her at Hackney. Here, Charles spent his
Sundays and holidays, and, when their father died in 1799, she took
up her abode permanently with her brother, leaving him only
when the threatenings of recurrent attacks of insanity made it
necessary.
In 1796 began the association between Coleridge and Charles
Lloyd, a sensitive young Birmingham quaker; and, in January 1797,
Lloyd unexpectedly sought Lamb out in London. Lamb, still suffer-
ing from a sense of loneliness and neglect, conceived a strong
attachment for his friend's disciple. To the second edition of
Coleridge's Poems (October 1797) were added poems by Lamb
and Lloyd; and in 1798 appeared a small volume of Blank Verse,
by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, to which Lamb contributed
seven poems, including The Old Familiar Faces, one of the most
perfect expressions in English of infinite regret tempered by re-
signation. Friendship with Lloyd meant much pleasant literary
intercourse, and from one particular branch of literature to which
Lloyd introduced him Lamb learned a sympathy with quakerism
and its staid reliance upon 'the inward light' as the source of
intellectual peace, a sympathy which never left him. Lloyd,
however, was not the best companion for a man in need of
bracing society. Lamb early discovered in him ‘an exquisite-
ness of feeling' which 'must border on derangement,' and, a
year after his first visit, found himself on the brink of a
## p. 185 (#209) ############################################
VIII]
185
Charles and Robert Lloyd
I
2
quarrel, for which, however, he blamed his own impatience at
Lloyd's well-meant devotion. Coleridge, meanwhile, had some-
what tired of Lloyd, and a growing coolness developed into open
rupture. In Edmund Oliver, a novel published in 1798, Lloyd
vented some of his feeling against Coleridge, and by this time his
wounded vanity had effected a breach between Coleridge and
Lamb. He told Lamb—inexcusably, even if it were true—that
Coleridge had said, “Poor Lamb! if he wants any knowledge, he
may apply to me. ' Lamb's retort to this was Theses quaedam
theologicae, enclosed in a letter written in June 1798. For once
in their friendship, Lamb showed himself the weaker man of the
two. His Theses, clever as they are, might have led to the
permanent sundering of a friendship as salutary to Coleridge as it
was inspiring to Lamb, had not Coleridge magnanimously over-
looked the affront. Within little more than a year, they were
again friends. In the interval, Lamb had probably seen more
than enough of Charles Lloyd. In January 1799, a younger
brother, Robert, who had rebelled against the quaker traditions of
his family, sought refuge with Lamb from his father's supposed
persecution. To this amiable youth, whose chief fault was a
readiness to manufacture his own troubles, Lamb addressed a
number of letters, one or two of them among the best that he
wrote. Lamb recognised him as 'the flower of his family, and
his early death was a source of deep grief to a household which,
in spite of disagreements, was united by close bonds of affection.
In later years, Lamb sent criticisms to the father of the Lloyds
upon his verse translations of classical authors; but the friendship
with Charles Lloyd gradually ceased. Lloyd's sensitiveness grew
upon him with years : he became a prey to nervous melancholy
and died near Versailles in 1839, with his reason hopelessly
overclouded.
Lamb's first independent work in prose, A Tale of Rosamund
Gray and Old Blind Margaret, was published in the summer of
1798. Already, as we have seen, he had had some share in
White's Original Letters, etc. , of Sir John Falstaff in July 1796.
Rosamund Gray, told in simple prose interwoven with literary
phrase, remembered and appropriated from his reading, is a
sombre and tragic narrative. In its theme of undeserved mis-
fortune overtaking the young and innocent, Lamb had his own
experiences in mind. The resignation of Allan Clare, the sur-
vivor of his elder sister and his dead love, is uttered by Lamb
himself.
6
## p. 186 (#210) ############################################
186
[CH.
Lamb
I gave my heart to the Purifier, and my will to the Sovereign Will of the
Universe. The irresistible wheels of destiny passed on in their everlasting
rotation,-and I suffered myself to be carried along with them without
complaining.
6
The scene of the story is Widford; Blakesware, the home of Allan
and Elinor Clare, is visited in memory by the narrator ; and in
the ill-fated Rosamund is bodied forth the Alice of Elia. In
Elinor, whose relation to Allan resembles that of Mary Lamb to
Charles, there is a reminiscence of 'high-born Helen'; and it is
at her grave, not at that of Rosamund, that Allan and his friend
meet again. Thus, Lamb showed his capacity of transmuting his
pleasures and sorrows into forms of imagination and of treading
the border-line between truth and fiction with an unmatched
delicacy. Even in bis melancholy, he could not fail to reproduce
something of the double aspect of life; and occasional gentle
touches of amused observation prove his power of balancing and
reconciling the comic and tragic elements in human nature.
there his ideals of liberty would become a reality. His three
years in America present shifting scenes ending in disappoint-
ment and a determination that his family should return to
England. In the following winter (1787–8), the father was
called to the little church at Wem, near Shrewsbury. For more
than a quarter of a century, the Hazlitts lived in this remote
village. Most of the years between the age of ten and twenty-
two, young William spent at Wem. So far, there is little indi-
cation of what the future had in keeping for the son of the poor,
obscure, dissenting minister. The diary written by his sister
Margaret in America attests his delight in the long walks across
country with his father in Massachusetts. Numerous references
in his essays describe with enthusiasm the pleasure which he found
in walking with his father in the country about Wem and in talking
on metaphysical subjects.
The other influence which seems with increasing years to have
grown into a passion is the impression of nature upon him. His
## p. 166 (#190) ############################################
166
[CH.
Hazlitt
eye was ever turned out of the window. In his own garden at
Wem, he watched with a sympathy akin to Thoreau's 'the broccoli
plants and kidney beans of his own rearing. His tramps led him
into all parts of Shropshire, to Peterborough, and into Wales.
Nature was company enough' for him. Although he afterwards
wrote much and well about books, he always associated everything
with outdoor life-books which he had read, churches or pictures
which he had seen, people whom he had met. Even the battles of
Napoleon had such associations :
On the same day the news of the battle of Austerlitz came; I walked out
in the afternoon and, as I returned, saw the evening star set over a poor man's
cottage with other thoughts and feelings than I shall ever have again.
He struggled long and hard to find himself and his place in the
world. When he was fifteen, he was sent by his father to the
nonconformist theological seminary at Hackney. There, he found
a deal of metaphysics to his liking, and, also, soon discovered
that the ministry was not to be his calling. Fortunately for him,
his brother John was a portrait-painter in London working under
the direction of Sir Joshua Reynolds. To his brother's studio,
William made frequent visits and became enamoured of the pro-
fession of painting. He was more than ever in doubt what to do.
After an unsuccessful year at school, he returned to Wem. He could
not preach, he would like to paint, he wished to write but could not.
'I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless like a worm by the
wayside. ' One day, in 1796, he found a copy of Burke's Letter to a
Noble Lord. For the first time, he felt what it must be to write,
'to be able to convey the slightest conception of my meaning to
others in words. ' Then, a new light shone into his soul. He met
Coleridge, heard him preach, walked and talked with him and was
invited to visit him at Nether Stowey and to meet Wordsworth.
What this meant for Hazlitt he has described, with the charm of a
poet, in My First Acquaintance with Poets, one of the finest
essays in the language. As if from a dream, the young man of
twenty arose with a resolution that the greatest discouragements
could not shake off. Not quite ready to give up painting, he
spent a little while with his brother in London. He crossed to
the Louvre, where, for several months, he made copies of the
masters for friends at home and actually went about in northern
England painting portraits of his father, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Lamb and others. Then, his career as a painter came abruptly to
a close. Nothing remained for him but to write.
1
## p. 167 (#191) ############################################
VII]
167
His Later Life
>
Like the careers of the other romantic essayists of the period,
Hazlitt's life presents nothing of thrilling interest. We know
little about it, aside from references in his essays, in the interesting
diary of Crabb Robinson and in the letters of Charles and Mary
Lamb. He became a friend of the most notable people in
London ; above all, he was always welcome at the rooms of the
Lambs. He has left us the best description of one of their Wednes-
day evenings. Unfortunately, he came to know a certain Sarah
Stoddart, a friend of Mary Lamb. After an unromantic court-
ship, they were married in 1808, with Charles Lamb as one of the
four witnesses. Charles wrote ominously to Southey, 'I was at
Hazlitt's marriage and had like to have been turned out several
times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. '
After the wedding, the Hazlitts moved to Sarah's cottage at
Winterslow, a little village about six miles from Salisbury. For
about three years they lived at Winterslow, and afterwards, for
brief periods, Hazlitt repaired thither to obtain some of the
seclusion which contributed largely to his best writing. To neither
of the two persons was the union agreeable, and they planned to
go together to Scotland to obtain a divorce. A second marriage,
with a Mrs Bridgewater, proved a mere episode in his life and
seemed to confirm the opinion held by his friends that at least
Hazlitt's temper was not conducive to a life of marital happiness.
Twenty-five years were allotted to Hazlitt for his life-work.
In that short span, he succeeded in making his way to fame from
absolute obscurity, without the prestige of family or wealth, with
no formal education and no friends of influence. This he achieved
at a time when there were many men of Titanic mould. He won
distinction as a lecturer ; his criticisms on books, pictures and
plays were widely read; he became known as one of the best
talkers and he was the target of the invectives of some of the
cleverest, as well as the most brutal, of the reviewers in the leading
magazines.
The writings of Hazlitt have recently been collected by A. R.
Waller and Arnold Glover and published in twelve large, closely
printed volumes, in all about six thousand pages. Not many
of us would wish to read all these pages. Some of his writing
is forced and superficial, notably his essays on philosophy; some
is unpleasant, for example, the sentimental record of his passion
for the stupid servant girl in Liber Amoris; some is bitter and
full of prejudice; but, withal, there is much, very much, that is
fine, so fine that William Ernest Henley only yesterday could
## p. 168 (#192) ############################################
168
[ch.
Hazlitt
6
6
say, 'Hazlitt is ever Hazlitt; and at his highest moments Hazlitt
is hard to beat, and has not these many years been beaten. '
In whatever he did he was an enthusiast. The same gusto
which, as a boy, he had shown in his discussions with his father, he
displayed in his reading of philosophy and in his first attempt
(Essay on the Principles of Human Action, 1805) to elucidate
the systems of Hartley and Helvetius. He liked to cherish his
experiences : books that he had read, plays which he had seen,
pictures that he had admired. He liked to discuss abstract
propositions while he walked alone in the country, trying to
'forget the town and all that is in it. He liked to tell what he
liked and, above everything, be liked to try to say things in his
own way. And he succeeded so well that Stevenson, who admired
him ungrudgingly, once said of him, “We are all mighty fine
fellows, but none of us can write like Hazlitt. Certainly, it was,
for him, better to travel than to arrive'; else, it would be difficult
to understand how a man so widely hated, so bitterly attacked,
so much alone, could say on his death-bed : 'Well, I have had a
happy life. '
The subjects of his lectures or essays on authors and their
works include almost every name worth knowing in English
literature from Chaucer to Hazlitt's own day-men of varied
literary attainment of the Elizabethan era, wits of the restoration,
comic writers, dramatists, poets, novelists of the eighteenth
century and almost all his contemporaries.
When we consider that he did not have the guides and hand-
books of today which tell us dogmatically what to like and how to
appreciate the masterpieces of English literature, we get a better
understanding of the range and variety of these criticisms. He
had had almost no formal training, he knew little of ancient
classical literature in the original languages; but, somehow, in his
goings to and fro, he had laid hold of some of the great books of
the world and he had read them well : perhaps he knew Shake-
speare best, Montaigne was his model essayist and he knew
something of Le Sage, Rabelais, Rousseau, Boccaccio, Cervantes,
Goethe and Schiller. Among English writers, his favourites were
Spenser, Milton, Congreve, Swift, Arbuthnot, Burke, Fielding,
Richardson and Scott.
If his preparation for the task of a literary critic seems not
what we should expect today, certainly we are surprised how well
he succeeded in appraising the best English literature. Perhaps
his greatest service to his time was the attention which he
## p. 169 (#193) ############################################
VII]
Hazlitt as a Critic
169
directed to Shakespeare. Chagrined by the lack of intelligent
English criticism of Shakespeare, he praised without reserve
A. W. Schlegel for his sympathetic interpretation and set to
work to discuss each play with a gusto that has never been
excelled. Heine stated that, up to his time, Hazlitt's was the
best comment on Shakespeare. Perhaps his criticism lacked the
profoundness and philosophical insight of Coleridge and the
affectionate appreciation of Lamb, but it is more inclusive than
either. For the reader of today who wishes to read the plays of
Shakespeare with unadulterated enjoyment, not deviating into
dogmatic assertion or scientific research, Hazlitt is a sure guide.
His series of comments on Shakespeare's plays and characters is a
challenge to the reader to turn again to the scenes where he will
find something new in an old familiar passage. We can be certain
that Hazlitt has not led us into a waste of philological or philo-
sophical speculation. He does not put himself between Shakespeare
and ourselves but helps us to know Shakespeare better as a poet
and as a dramatist who saw life from many angles.
Likewise, the other dramatists of Shakespeare's day and
writers of prose receive most intelligent appreciation. Perhaps
the best of his critical work is the clear and discriminating
interpretation of the spirit of the Elizabethan age. Sifting the
gold from the dross, he sets in proper place the men and forces
which made the era great. In his discussion of seventeenth
century writers, he sounds surprisingly modern. His regard for
Milton, Bunyan, Sir Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor does not
show the same degree of devotion as does Lamb's quaint imitation
of them, but his judgment of their work as literature is certainly
more to be trusted by the reader who desires to view English
literature in its true perspective. Like many of his successors,
Hazlitt found the eighteenth century interesting in its virility, and
his preferences are amazingly supported by the best judgment of
today. He appreciated intelligently the forceful simplicity of
eighteenth century style and inherited the best qualities of that
style. He displayed genius in his ability to discern what was
real beneath the formality and affectation of eighteenth century
manners. His criticism of Pope, whom most of his contemporaries
did not understand, shows with what intelligence he recognised
Pope as the poet of art in contrast with Shakespeare the poet
of nature. He extolled the eloquence of Burke and urged re-
peatedly that here was the finest model for the expression, in
prose, of imaginative feeling.
## p. 170 (#194) ############################################
170
[CH.
Hazlitt
Hazlitt's criticism of his contemporaries in The Spirit of the
Age is in accord with his courageous position on all questions.
That he should sit in judgment on his own friends seemed to
him as natural as that he should speak out what he thought of
writers long since dead. It was inevitable that the personal esti-
mate should play a part here; but it is remarkable how a full
century accepts his verdict. To be sure, there are bits of ill-
temper and personal prejudice, but there is so much which is
sound and genuine that it is safe to say that these essays are
almost the last of Hazlitt's writings which the student of English
literature would surrender. The particular essays show the
fighting qualities of a man who was animated with fiery courage,
whom Gifford and the whole pack of hostile reviewers found a
most worthy antagonist. What he thought most worthy we still
admire, Coleridge, Cobbett, Scott, the greatest and wisest' of the
novelists, Wordsworth, 'the most original poet now living. We
do not hate all that he hated, but what he loved we find is most
deserving of our love.
To his envious contemporaries, who taunted him with a lack of
reading which, they affirmed, was displayed by the frequent re-
currence of the same quotation in his essays, he said,
I have been found fault with for repeating myself and for a narrow range
of ideas. To a want of general reading I plead guilty and am sorry for it
but perhaps if I had read more I might have thought less.
Perhaps that was an easy way to excuse himself; but it is true
that he tried most earnestly to cultivate the habit of thinking, and
detested nothing so much as servile imitation. He wished to
think and feel for himself. If he did not drink deep, he was an
expert taster. He wrote as he would have talked, guided by
an unusually catholic sympathy. No one literary form or period,
author or group of writers blinded him to the enjoyment of the
long sweep of varied literary expression. He had not sworn
allegiance to any school. Without historical or scientific equip-
ment, he was possessed of a rare faculty for describing a literary
movement and putting his finger on the central and impelling
force. For the mere dates of an author's life or mere linguistic
details, he had little interest. His enjoyment of Hamlet, Lear,
Othello, was not affected by any questions of textual uncertainty
or priority of composition. To him, it was sufficient that here
was poetry of a high order, that here was something that made
him glad to be alive.
An important contribution of Hazlitt is his comment on the
## p. 171 (#195) ############################################
VII)
171
Hazlitt's Dramatic Criticism
stage, largely included in A Review of the English Stage; or, A
Series of Dramatic Criticisms (1818, 1821). His first continuous
employment was on The Morning Chronicle, in 1813, for which he
wrote his first dramatic criticism, and, save for a few unimportant
things by Leigh Hunt, the first of its kind in our literature.
Later, he wrote for The Examiner, The Champion, The Times
and, finally, The London Magazine. These hundred or more of
articles include much interesting discussion of the theatres, plays
and actors of his time. His visits took him to Drury lane, Covent
garden, The Haymarket, The Lyceum, The King's, Surrey, The
Adelphi, The Coburg, The Aquatic and The East London. He wrote
of all the plays of Shakespeare, of those of the restoration and the
eighteenth century which were still given and of the first perform-
ances of plays of his own time. He described winter and summer
plays, pantomimes, operas and oratorios. He has left the best
account of the actors and actresses whom he saw, the Kembles, Kean,
Macready, Booth, Bannister, Miss Stephens, Mrs Siddons, as well
as sketches of others of whom we now know only the names. As
with his appreciation of literature, Hazlitt was not a formal critic
of the drama and theatre. His taste was formed under the
direction of his feelings. He wrote of the drama with gusto, not
because it was a great literary form made illustrious by Shake-
speare, possessed of formal technique and of a brilliant history, but
because he liked to go to the play to see the happy faces in the
pit,' to watch the actors in their parts and then, enriched by the
happy experiences of the evening, to go home to think it all over.
We like the stage because we like to talk about ourselves. We
do not like any person or persons who do not like plays. ' His
criticism is the vivid record of these impressions. He watched
closely the entrances and exits of the actors, their eyes, faces,
hands, listened to the cadences of the spoken sentences, and
marked the differences in an actor on successive evenings. Rarely
did he analyse a play as a formal composition, nor was he much
interested in the technique of the verse. The fine speeches held
him and the varying gales of passion, as they sweep the characters
into this or that extremity. A drama was something to be played,
and his comments took the form of personal descriptions of
Kemble as Sir Giles Overreach, Miss O'Neill as Lady Teazle,
Mrs Siddons as Lady Macbeth, Macready as Othello, or Kean as
lago, Shylock or Richard III.
In this field, he was a pioneer and his writings mark an epoch
in the history of theatrical criticism. Before his day, honest
6
6
## p. 172 (#196) ############################################
172
[ch.
Hazlitt
reviews of plays were unknown. Leigh Hunt had seen the oppor-
tunity and had introduced the new department in The Examiner,
but his imprisonment and that of his brother on account of
libellous publications had prevented the continuance of this phase
of their work. Not only was Hazlitt the first to give attention to
dramatic criticism, but he was, also, without special training for
this form of writing. He had always liked to go to the play and,
in the years of his closest intimacy with Charles Lamb, had spent
many evenings in the different London theatres. His fondness for
the theatre and his natural zest in human action were a sufficient
preparation for him in any work which required the power of
observation and of vivid description. As a critic of the stage, he
conceived it to be his duty to be fair to the actor and to the
public. We doubt if he allowed himself to express an opinion
which he did not sincerely hold, or indulge in praise or blame
which he thought not deserved.
Though I do not repent of what I have said in praise of certain actors,
yet I wish I could retract what I had been obliged to say in reprobation of
actors. . . . I never understood that the applauded actor thought himself
personally obliged to the newspaper critic; the latter was merely supposed
to do his duty.
a
As a boy and as a young man, Hazlitt loved pictures. To him,
they were the reflection of what was beautiful in nature. It will
be remembered that he tried to become a painter and turned aside
from that profession only when he recognised that he could not be
equal to any one of his ideal painters, Claude, Rembrandt, Titian
or Raphael. He wrote once, 'I am a slave to the picturesque,' and
so he was. In the face of nature, he saw the charm of line and
colour, and his essays abound in passages that could only have
been written by one who was sensitive to those effects of landscape
which the painter sees. Doubtless, he had some skill of hand, for
his brother and friends encouraged him to become a painter, but
he felt that, in this work, he could not succeed, and, therefore,
would not try. Happily for English literature, however, he
knew much about painting from his conversations with Flaxman,
Haydon and Northcote and his reading of Sir Joshua Reynolds
and Jonathan Richardson, and equipped with this knowledge,
he turned from painting to writing about pictures.
It is safe to say that no essayist, contemporary with him, was
his equal in natural aptitude or in knowledge of what the painter
was trying to achieve, although he never really fashioned his ideas
into a system. As in his other criticism, he was an enthusiast
## p. 173 (#197) ############################################
VII] Hazlitt's Writings on Art 173
depending upon the turn taken by his personal impressions. One
requirement only he insisted upon : that “art must be true to
nature. ' By this, he meant no mere photographic reproduction,
but an interpretation of nature by the artist, expressed in such a
way that the picture conveyed a meaning. So, he never thought
of praising mere technical excellence. The canvasses of his beloved
Claude, Titian, Rembrandt were more than mere delineations, they
were allied to poetry, each expressing, in its own beautiful form,
the meaning of life, an emanation of the moral and intellectual
part of our nature, as well as of the sensitive.
In his appreciation of painting, he tried, above everything else,
to be honest with himself. He did not lack the courage to say
what he honestly felt or saw.
Before Ruskin was born, he wrote:
'In landscape Turner has shown a knowledge of the effects of air
and of powerful relief in objects which was never surpassed. ' He
was not less ready to praise rising young artists, such as Haydon
and Wilson, than he was to join in the universal approbation of such
masters as Claude, Poussin, Rembrandt or Titian. And he would
as readily indicate what he regarded as faults in the masters as
praise the excellence of artists hitherto unknown. If he got no
further than an expression of his feelings, at any rate he said
what he liked, not because it was the fashion to like a certain
picture or because he found it starred in a guide-book, but because
he liked it.
My taste in pictures is, I believe, very different from that of rich and
princely collectors. . . . I should like to have a few pictures hung round the
room that speak to me with well-known looks, that touch some string of
memory, not a number of varnished, smooth, glittering gew-gawe.
Like some other writers of the romantic period, he contributed
little or nothing to a philosophical discussion of the arts. Ever
since the wonderful day when he acted as guide to Charles and Mary
Lamb through the gallery of Blenheim, he has been an inspiration
to the layman who has wished to cultivate a liking for good
pictures. At a time when few people were allowed to see famous
paintings in English galleries, Hazlitt described these pictures
for his readers vividly and rapturously, before Ruskin's sympa-
thetic criticism, with its imaginative descriptions of pictures and
buildings, made people see more in the world that lay about them.
That his work had a serious result is attested by Gosse, who, in
the introduction to his edition of Hazlitt's Conversations of James
Northcote, says: ‘he claimed for painting the identity of a branch
## p. 174 (#198) ############################################
174
[CH.
Hazlitt
of literature and expended on it the wealth of his ever-fervid and
impassioned imagination. '
For the majority of readers, the most interesting part of
Hazlitt's work is to be found in his miscellaneous essays.
.
Like his most worthy contemporaries, Lamb, De Quincey, Words-
worth, Byron, Shelley, he set forth his personal experiences
and his personal prejudices. Here, then, we come nearest to the
real man Hazlitt. To repeat the lines which he frequently quoted,
he liked
To pour out all as plain
As downright Shippen or as old Montaigne.
The best of Hazlitt, then, is to be found in such essays as
My First Acquaintance with Poets, On Going a Journey, The
Feeling of Immortality in Youth, On Reading Old Books, On
Reading New Books, Of Persons One Would Wish to have seen,
On the Fear of Death, On Disagreeable People, On Taste, On
Familiar Style, The Sick Chamber, The Fight. After everything
has been sifted, Hazlitt is to be judged by these essays, and, doubt-
less, he would be willing to have it so.
On one occasion, he wrote, “I have not written a line that licks
the dust. Incidents of his early life had kept burning the fires
of independence and courageous expression. Born in a family
known for its hearty acceptance of the views of dissent, he had
grown up in close association with his father, with whom he
enjoyed discussion upon the most abstract subjects. To the ideals
of his youth he had clung tenaciously and he had shunned the
appearance of deserting the cause of republicanism or liberty in
any form. His first published composition was a letter to The
Shrewsbury Chronicle (1791), in which he stood out for fair treat-
ment of Priestley, whose house had been burned by a mob in
Birmingham. He did not follow the judgments of English critics,
neither was he held in thrall by the thought of Germany or
France. He wished to see and feel things for himself. This spirit
of independence, sometimes blinded by ill-temper or bitter re-
sentment, was always asserting itself, whether in championing the
cause of a new actor, in praising an aspiring young painter, in
giving a new turn to an old definition or in holding at bay the pack
of reviewers whose numbers made them bold to attack a superior
antagonist. He was born not to be a coward. He was a good
fighter. Although he often found himself in a minority of one,
he
found enjoyment in the feeling that he was right according to
his abstract principles.
## p. 175 (#199) ############################################
VII]
His Models
175
For us, the most interesting result of this independence is his
resolution not to be satisfied with anything short of his best in
writing. Two fine examples always stood before him-Montaigne,
who may be said to have been the first to say as an author what
he felt as a man,' and Burke, who ‘poured out his mind on paper.
'
He has told us, in many places, of his difficulty in learning how
to write.
6
Oh, how little do they know who have never done anything but repeat
after others by rote, the labor, the yearnings and misgivings of mind it costs
to get the germ of an original idea, to dig it out of the hidden recesses of
thought and nature and to bring it half-ashamed, struggling, and deformed
into the day-to give words and intelligible symbols to that which was never
imagined or expressed before.
That he succeeded to an unusual degree in his ambition is now
a matter of record. Coleridge wrote of him that he said things
in his own way. His vigorous mind, seriously given to thinking,
would not be satisfied with expression that fell short of his con-
ception of clearness. He was not content with the homely
simplicity of Defoe, or the intellectual force of Swift: he aspired to
succeed, as Burke had succeeded, in conveying something of the
beauty and eloquence of truth and nature. What he wrote must
express all the shades of his sensitive imagination. It is not strange,
then, that he knew the meaning of words and strove unceasingly
to get the proper word for the proper place. The ephemeral
word or phrase found no place in his style, nor was he given to
coining words or to transplanting foreign words. Conse-
quently, his diction is remarkable for its purity. How well
he made the standard English vocabulary serve his purpose may
be found in his description of The Fight, where he does not feel
the need of adopting the slang of the ring to give a thrilling
account of an exciting contest. It is interesting to contrast this
passage with De Quincey's Murder as one of the Fine Arts. Not
only did he search for the right word but he strove for conciseness
in so far as the language would convey all that he wished to say.
'I hate to see a load of band-boxes go along the street, and I hate
to see a parcel of big words without anything in them. '
Hazlitt seems never to have been without the word which
would express with directness and vividness what was in his mind.
That he could parry as with a rapier, William Gifford must have
learned to his discomfort while he read the celebrated Letter.
De Quincey called his style 'abrupt, insulated, capricious, and
. . . non-sequacious. ' There is a sense in which this is true. For
-
## p. 176 (#200) ############################################
176
[CH.
Hazlitt
a time, the thought seems not to move. It is thrown into the
air like balls by a juggler, and we catch reflections of it, and
are thrilled and excited to pleasure in watching. One happy
phrase after another-an old quotation in a new setting, a
flash of sentiment, a bit of keen perceiving, a wise observation
on life—all thrown together, carry us on with a rapidity and a
stateliness that are not excelled in English literature.
The opening passage of his essay on poetry illustrates the
movement of his expository writing. Here, we have Hazlitt
thinking with overflowing zest upon a subject which was life to
him. Because he is trying to write something on a subject
which every critic or poet has discussed does not embarrass him.
As a man of feeling, who cannot reduce poetry to mere formal
words, he pours himself out with the richness and seriousness of
the most unabashed romanticist.
Or we may turn to his essay, The Feeling of Immortality
in Youth, to the passage beginning 'To see the golden sun, and
the azure sky. Observe the gusto with which he follows the
'
thought until he is actually out of breath. Here is the elaborate
stateliness of Sir Thomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor without the
quaintness of the seventeenth century which allured Charles
Lamb. In outline, it is formal and imposing; in meaning, it is
concrete, vivid and personal.
The virility of his enthusiasm is best shown in his delight in
outdoor life. No writer of today, after a century given to the
study and enjoyment of open air life, writes of it with greater zest
and more consistent inspiration. His essay, On Going a Journey,
is a pleasure to all lovers of Stevenson and Thoreau.
In many respects, the most memorable piece of writing of
William Hazlitt is the essay to which he has given the attractive
title, My First Acquaintance with Poets, one of the fine, immortal
essays in our language. The young man of twenty meets in
1798 the philosopher Coleridge and the poet Wordsworth. The
man of forty looks back through the glamour of the intervening
years and breaks forth with lyric enthusiasm at the thought of
these rich experiences.
In these essays, we have some of the best of Hazlitt-an
expression which is concrete, vivid, personal, vigorous ; the voice
of a manly and courageous seeker after truth, who sees nothing
inconsistent in the combination of truth and sentiment, truth and
beauty.
Hazlitt's habit of repeated quotation has caused irritation to
## p. 177 (#201) ############################################
VII]
His Quotations
177
>
6
6
6
6
>
6
many readers. He used innumerable quotations, consisting of a
mere phrase or of many lines, whenever he desired. If they do not
serve him as they stand, he does not hesitate to change a word or
phrase or to join two or more quotations together. He took supreme
pleasure in an apt phrase, whether of his own coinage or whether
he had picked it up long before in some source which he had taken
no pains to remember. He sought justification in the manner in
which he made his quotations convey his own ideas. Some of the
lines which he liked best to quote are here given as he wrote
them. Our life is of mingled yarn, good and ill together,' 'holds
the mirror up to nature,' 'web of our life,' 'too much i’ the sun,'
comes home to the business of men,' 'the stuff of which our life
is made,' sees into the life of things,' ever in the haunch of
winter sings,' 'fate, fore-will, foreknowledge absolute,’ ‘come like
shadows, so depart,' 'at one proud swoop,' with all its giddy
raptures,' 'the witchery of the soft blue sky,' 'it smiled and it
was cold,' sounding on his way,''men's minds are parcel of their
fortunes. ' A glance at this list will show the preponderance of
.
quotations from Shakespeare. These he applied everywhere and
in every possible connection. Next after Shakespeare, as sources,
come Milton, the Bible, Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Cowper,
Rousseau, Sterne, Fielding, Wordsworth. He had not the slightest
reluctance to appropriate a phrase that he liked in any book
which he read.
One characteristic marks his style especially, his use of the
parallel construction and contrast. He liked to join his subjects
in pairs; for example, Cant and Hypocrisy, Wit and Humour,
Past and Future, Thought and Action, Genius and Common
Sense, Patronage and Puffing, Writing and Speaking and so on
ad infinitum. So, he was much accustomed to discussing his
subject with the aid of contrast, as Wilkie and Hogarth, Shake-
speare and Jonson, Chaucer and Spenser, Voltaire and Swift,
Thomson and Cowper, Addison and Steele, Gray and Collins,
Dryden and Pope. In this particular, he had an influence upon
modern literary criticism, which has often used this means of
defining the relative importance of English writers.
Some readers, nourished on the fare of the Victorians, have
objected to Hazlitt on the ground that his writing shows mere
feeling and no moral purpose. Certainly, one does not think of
him as a inoralist with a message like Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, or
Browning, yet he, like all great English writers, was guided by
certain principles and was consistently true to certain ideals.
12
E. L. XII.
CH. VII.
## p. 178 (#202) ############################################
178
[CH.
Hazlitt
-
Hazlitt was as bitter against affectation and insipidity as Carlyle
or Thackeray. Not more insistently than he, did Carlyle try to get
beneath mere clothes and separate the symbol from the thing.
Ruskin had no more genuine love of nature and saw not more clearly
than Hazlitt the relation between life and the beauty of nature.
In his efforts to think clearly upon life and to express himself with
classic simplicity, there is a suggestion of Matthew Arnold. In
his virility of expression and the hopefulness with which he wrote
in continued adversity, we find something that suggests the
optimism of Browning and Stevenson. Though he was not a
moralist according to the general meaning of that word, he never
turned from the serious problem of life. He was no shallow
optimist or railing pessimist. There is, throughout his writing, an
abiding faith in human nature, a devotion to beauty and an
allegiance to ideals of square-dealing, honesty and truthfulness,
that made his life happy when those who looked on-all save one-
called him of all men most lonely and miserable.
The influence of Hazlitt has been pervasive through the nine-
teenth century. Among his contemporaries, there were those who
would have nothing to do with his idols, Rousseau and Napoleon,
who did not share his radical views on politics, who despised his
enthusiastic style as mere sentimental twaddle. On the other
hand, there were those who, like Leigh Hunt, Lamb, Coleridge and
De Quincey, recognised, in some measure, the worth of the man.
Certain of the reviewers in the magazines, though they took delight
in abusing him personally, had good cause for admiring his literary
skill when they were the objects of his invective. Among the
great writers of English since his day, he has found many admirers
and imitators, many who have followed his lead in his appreciation
of art and of literature. Macaulay had a fondness for the same
balanced structure, the same tendency toward epigrammatic ex-
pression, the same persistent determination to write with unmis-
takable clearness. Newman's style bore ample testimony to the
eloquence which Hazlitt displayed in his most stately writing.
Thackeray wrote heartily in admiration :
1
Hazlitt was one of the keenest and brightest critics that ever lived.
With partialities and prejudices innumerable, he had a wit so keen, a
sensibility so exquisite, an appreciation of humour or pathos or even of the
greatest act so lively, quick and cultivated, that it was always good to know
what were the impressions made by books or men or pictures on such a
inind; and that, as there were not probably a dozen men in England with
powers so varied, all the rest of the world might be rejoiced to listen to the
opinions of this accomplished critic.
## p. 179 (#203) ############################################
vii]
179
Henley on Hazlitt
In similar vein wrote Froude, Bagehot, Lowell, Stevenson
and many other worthy judges of our best literature. Perhaps
the surest comment which indicates the estimate of today is by
William Ernest Henley in the concluding paragraph of his in-
troduction to the complete edition of Hazlitt's works, already
cited:
:
As a writer, therefore, it is with Lamb that I would bracket him: they
are dissimilars, but they go gallantly and naturally together-par nobile
fratrum. Give us these two, with some ripe Cobbett, a volume of Southey,
some Wordsworth, certain pages of Shelley, a great deal of the Byron who
wrote letters, and we get the right prose of the time. The best of it all,
perhaps, is the best of Lamb. But Hazlitt's, for different qualities, is so
imminent and shining a second that I hesitate as to the pre-eminency.
Probably the race is Lamb's. But Hazlitt is ever Hazlitt; and at his
highest moments Hazlitt is hard to beat, and has not these many years
been beaten.
1242
## p. 180 (#204) ############################################
CHAPTER VIII
LAMB
By reason of its intimate nature and the colour which it took
from the personal events of his life, the work of Charles Lamb is
inseparable from the circumstances in which it came into being.
This is peculiarly true of more than one of the great writers of
the early nineteenth century. The biographies of Byron, Shelley
,
and Coleridge are necessary complements to the understanding
of their poetry. But, in none of these three cases is a succession
of incidents so closely interwoven in prose and poetry as is the
more peaceful life of Lamb in his writings. Those writings, inspired
by the influence of the moment and by a lively remembrance of
the past, take their place in the course of a story on which they
form a running comment; and it is this story, chequered by the
presence of sorrow and tragedy and beautified by the endurance
of high human affection, which has given Lamb a special place
in literary history. His genius matured in submission to its
.
influence: the experience of daily life was the source of the
sympathy with humanity which pervades his style and lends to it
an abiding charm.
Lamb's statement that his father came from Lincoln has never
been proved positively, but is probably an exception to his usual
habit of embroidering fiction upon fact. John Lamb, whose
characteristics are known to us from his son's affectionate portrait
of Lovel, 'a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty,' with
'a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to resemble,
was clerk and general factotum to Samuel Salt of the Inner
Temple. The father, 'as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you
could desire,' gave some proof of literary talent in a small volume
entitled Poetical Pieces on Several Occasions, the best of which,
an amusing description of the daily routine of a lady's footman,
was probably drawn from his own early experience. He married
Elizabeth Field, a member of a family of Hertfordshire farmers.
1
## p. 181 (#205) ############################################
CH. VIII]
School-days
181
They lived in Salt's house at 2 Crown office row, in the Inner
Temple, Mrs Lamb acting as housekeeper. Their eldest son,
John, described by Lamb as James Elia, was born in June 1763.
Mary Lamb was the second child, born in December 1764.
Charles, the youngest, was born on 10 February 1775. Four other
children, two boys and two girls, died in infancy.
Salt's house in the Temple was Lamb's home for the first
seventeen years of his life. Here, Mary Lamb, ten years his
senior,
1764. serviving
was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old
English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will
upon that fair and wholesome pasturage.
>
In the quiet courts and ‘bricky towres' of the Temple, close to,
yet aloof from, streaming London's central roar,' Lamb learned
to survey the ways of the world about him with sympathetic
observation, and to interpret them in their true proportions with
an amused delight at their variety and movement. London,
‘itself a pantomime and masquerade,' early enveloped him with
its attraction. 'I often shed tears in the motley Strand,' he wrote
to Wordsworth in 1801, ‘from fulness of joy at so much life. ' To
Manning and to Robert Lloyd, his praise of his native city is
equally lyric, and, throughout life, London continued to supply
his imagination with material upon which it readily worked its
fantasies.
Lamb learned reading and writing at a day-school in Fetter
lane, kept by one William Bird, which he attended with his sister
and afterwards described in Captain Starkey, one of the essays
contributed to Hone's Every-Day Book. In October 1782, he
entered Christ's hospital, having been presented to the foundation
by one of the governors, a friend of Samuel Salt. His recollections
of the seven years spent here are embodied in an essay printed in
The Gentleman's Magazine for June 1813, and in the more famous
essay in which he blended his own experiences with the less happy
memories of his contemporary Coleridge. The friendship with
Coleridge, begun at Christ's hospital, lasted, with one short break,
throughout their lives. In a famous apostrophe, touched with
that sense of regret for wasted energy and unfulfilled hope which
Coleridge's later career naturally inspired, Lamb has recorded his
admiration for the precocious genius of his friend. Coleridge,
equally affectionate but less alive to reality, has characterised
Lamb as the 'gentle-hearted Charles' Gentle-hearted as he was
## p. 182 (#206) ############################################
182
[ch.
Lamb
a
in the best sense of the word, Lamb resented the epithet, and,
in fact, he was made of sterner stuff than Coleridge and proved
his capacity to face the facts of a world which, to the poet and
philosopher, was an unsubstantial vision.
In estimating the influence of early memories and friendships
upon Lamb's work, it is impossible to overlook his connection
with his mother's native county Hertford. His grandmother,
Mrs Field, was housekeeper at Blakesware, a large country house
in the parish of Widford, four miles east of Ware. The Plumers,
its owners, lived principally at Gilston, some miles away, and left
Blakesware in charge of Mrs Field. Charles and Mary Lamb
spent many holidays here, roaming freely through the deserted
mansion. In the autumn of 1799, Lamb revisited the place and
wrote to Southey of the tapestried bedroom and the old 'marble
hall, with Hogarth’s prints, and the Roman Caesars in marble
hung round,' of the wilderness and the village churchyard by
the park gates, 'where the bones of my honoured grandam lie. '
Mary Lamb described the house and recalled a childish experience
of her own in The Young Mahometan, one of the tales in
Mrs Leicester's School. The power of Blakesware upon Lamb's
growing imagination is drawn in Blakesmoor in H-shire,
where we see him sitting in the window-seat of the store-room,
reading Cowley, wandering through the house and creeping into
the haunted room, “but always in the daytime, with a passion
of fear,' so fascinated by the boundaries of his Eden,' that he
was ignorant of what lay beyond, and fancied the brook which ran
outside the park, ‘half hid by trees,' to be a romantic lake. In
Dream-Children, Blakesware is again described, with its empty
rooms, gardens, orangery and fish-pond ; his grandmother, bowed
down physically with wasting disease but unbowed in spirit, rises
before his memory; he recalls her special affection for his elder
brother John, ‘so handsome and spirited a youth, and a king to
the rest of us. A more shadowy reminiscence is the fair-haired
Alice, who lies buried in Widford churchyard, connected in
thought with the portrait of the Hertfordshire beauty which ‘hung
next the great bay-window' and was the subject of Mary Lamb's
stanzas to 'High-born Helen. ' "The green plains of pleasant
Hertfordshire' supplied a life-long attraction to Lamb, from the
days when, a boy at school, he attempted to trace the New River
to its source, to the long walks of later years, when he roamed
about Enfield or, with Mary Lamb and Barron Field, made his
pilgrimage from St Albans to the home of his relations at
## p. 183 (#207) ############################################
VII] Early Friendships, Mary Lamb 183
9
Mackery End. It was in these quiet byways that he found his
true point of contact with nature; and the placid grace which
dispenses its charm amid the parks and woods, grass-bordered
lanes and open greens, of Hertfordshire is not unlike the tranquil
beauty, never far from poetry, of his prose.
Lamb left Christ's hospital in 1789, and, two years later,
obtained a temporary appointment in the examiner's office in
the South-Sea house, which he held from September 1791 to
February 1792. This dignified establishment, in the unexacting
service of which his brother John spent his life, is described in
the first essay of Elia. In April 1792, he entered a scene of
greater activity in the East India house in Leadenhall street,
where, for thirty-three years, he performed his daily duties. In
this year, Samuel Salt died and the Lamb family left the Temple,
to settle eventually at 7 Little Queen street, Holborn. Between
1792 and 1796, the friendship with Coleridge continued, and
Coleridge fathered Lamb's earliest sonnet, which was printed
under the initials S. T. C. in The Morning Chronicle of 29 December
1794. Bowles, 'genius of the sacred fountain of tears,' was the
inspirer of this and other sonnets, which, by May 1796, had
reached the number of nine. Four of these were published in
Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects in 1796, and another,
addressed to Mary Lamb, is contained in the earliest of the letters
to Coleridge which has been preserved. This sonnet was written
in a lunatic asylum at Hoxton, where Lamb spent the six weeks
at the end of 1795 and the beginning of 1796. There was insanity
in his family, which was soon to declare itself tragically; but
this was the only occasion on which Lamb himself was affected by
it, and the cause which disturbed him so seriously can only be
conjectured. The correspondence with Coleridge, extending from
May 1796 to June 1798, has its moments of playfulness, but is
overcast by the melancholy of one who feels himself solitary.
Old schoolfellows, however, occasionally came to see him, among
them James White, whom he assisted in the authorship of The
Falstaff Letters; and he improved his acquaintance with the
scholarly and unpractical George Dyer, twenty years his elder.
The letters are full of allusions to his reading, chiefly among old
English authors, and contain much criticism of Coleridge's early
verse, especially of Religious Musings, to the fineness, and to the in-
equality, of which Lamb showed himself fully alive. He advocated
unitarianism and expressed admiration for Priestley with a fervour
which, although it declined in later years, gave permanent colour
a
## p. 184 (#208) ############################################
184
[CH.
Lamb
to his religious convictions, so far as we can gain any glimpse
of them.
For a time, however, the consolations of religion were foremost
in his mind. His mother had, for some time, been helpless and
dependent upon the care of her daughter. On 22 September
1796, Mary had a sudden fit of insanity, in which she killed her
mother. She was removed to a private asylum at Islington, and
Charles and his father went to 45 Chapel street, Pentonville.
Sarah Lamb, an aunt who lived with the family, was taken into
the house of a rich relation, but soon returned to her brother and
nephew, dying early in 1797. Lamb, thus, in his twenty-third
year, had 'the whole weight of the family' thrown on him-a
father in his second childhood, a dying aunt and a sister whose
returning reason was liable to fail again at any moment. John, the
elder brother, though possessed of many good qualities, was wrapped
up in his own affairs. It would have been easy to have taken his
advice and consigned Mary permanently to a madhouse; but Charles
preferred to make a home for his sister. During her father's life-
time, rooms were found for her at Hackney. Here, Charles spent his
Sundays and holidays, and, when their father died in 1799, she took
up her abode permanently with her brother, leaving him only
when the threatenings of recurrent attacks of insanity made it
necessary.
In 1796 began the association between Coleridge and Charles
Lloyd, a sensitive young Birmingham quaker; and, in January 1797,
Lloyd unexpectedly sought Lamb out in London. Lamb, still suffer-
ing from a sense of loneliness and neglect, conceived a strong
attachment for his friend's disciple. To the second edition of
Coleridge's Poems (October 1797) were added poems by Lamb
and Lloyd; and in 1798 appeared a small volume of Blank Verse,
by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, to which Lamb contributed
seven poems, including The Old Familiar Faces, one of the most
perfect expressions in English of infinite regret tempered by re-
signation. Friendship with Lloyd meant much pleasant literary
intercourse, and from one particular branch of literature to which
Lloyd introduced him Lamb learned a sympathy with quakerism
and its staid reliance upon 'the inward light' as the source of
intellectual peace, a sympathy which never left him. Lloyd,
however, was not the best companion for a man in need of
bracing society. Lamb early discovered in him ‘an exquisite-
ness of feeling' which 'must border on derangement,' and, a
year after his first visit, found himself on the brink of a
## p. 185 (#209) ############################################
VIII]
185
Charles and Robert Lloyd
I
2
quarrel, for which, however, he blamed his own impatience at
Lloyd's well-meant devotion. Coleridge, meanwhile, had some-
what tired of Lloyd, and a growing coolness developed into open
rupture. In Edmund Oliver, a novel published in 1798, Lloyd
vented some of his feeling against Coleridge, and by this time his
wounded vanity had effected a breach between Coleridge and
Lamb. He told Lamb—inexcusably, even if it were true—that
Coleridge had said, “Poor Lamb! if he wants any knowledge, he
may apply to me. ' Lamb's retort to this was Theses quaedam
theologicae, enclosed in a letter written in June 1798. For once
in their friendship, Lamb showed himself the weaker man of the
two. His Theses, clever as they are, might have led to the
permanent sundering of a friendship as salutary to Coleridge as it
was inspiring to Lamb, had not Coleridge magnanimously over-
looked the affront. Within little more than a year, they were
again friends. In the interval, Lamb had probably seen more
than enough of Charles Lloyd. In January 1799, a younger
brother, Robert, who had rebelled against the quaker traditions of
his family, sought refuge with Lamb from his father's supposed
persecution. To this amiable youth, whose chief fault was a
readiness to manufacture his own troubles, Lamb addressed a
number of letters, one or two of them among the best that he
wrote. Lamb recognised him as 'the flower of his family, and
his early death was a source of deep grief to a household which,
in spite of disagreements, was united by close bonds of affection.
In later years, Lamb sent criticisms to the father of the Lloyds
upon his verse translations of classical authors; but the friendship
with Charles Lloyd gradually ceased. Lloyd's sensitiveness grew
upon him with years : he became a prey to nervous melancholy
and died near Versailles in 1839, with his reason hopelessly
overclouded.
Lamb's first independent work in prose, A Tale of Rosamund
Gray and Old Blind Margaret, was published in the summer of
1798. Already, as we have seen, he had had some share in
White's Original Letters, etc. , of Sir John Falstaff in July 1796.
Rosamund Gray, told in simple prose interwoven with literary
phrase, remembered and appropriated from his reading, is a
sombre and tragic narrative. In its theme of undeserved mis-
fortune overtaking the young and innocent, Lamb had his own
experiences in mind. The resignation of Allan Clare, the sur-
vivor of his elder sister and his dead love, is uttered by Lamb
himself.
6
## p. 186 (#210) ############################################
186
[CH.
Lamb
I gave my heart to the Purifier, and my will to the Sovereign Will of the
Universe. The irresistible wheels of destiny passed on in their everlasting
rotation,-and I suffered myself to be carried along with them without
complaining.
6
The scene of the story is Widford; Blakesware, the home of Allan
and Elinor Clare, is visited in memory by the narrator ; and in
the ill-fated Rosamund is bodied forth the Alice of Elia. In
Elinor, whose relation to Allan resembles that of Mary Lamb to
Charles, there is a reminiscence of 'high-born Helen'; and it is
at her grave, not at that of Rosamund, that Allan and his friend
meet again. Thus, Lamb showed his capacity of transmuting his
pleasures and sorrows into forms of imagination and of treading
the border-line between truth and fiction with an unmatched
delicacy. Even in bis melancholy, he could not fail to reproduce
something of the double aspect of life; and occasional gentle
touches of amused observation prove his power of balancing and
reconciling the comic and tragic elements in human nature.
