|
|
2. William Hazlitt
Life:
Hazlitt was an
essayist, and, as such, one of the most important English writers of all
times. He was born to an English family headed up by a
Unitarian minister.
In 1783 the family moved to Boston where Hazlitt the senior, took up his
ministerial duties. By 1787, the family was back in England.
Between 1798 and 1827, in becoming one of the most lively and trenchant
cultural critics ever to write in English, Hazlitt never failed to imagine
those he wrote about, or to see himself, as inhabitants of a world in which
social forces shaped subjectivity. The new “style” and “spirit” of
contemporary literature remained prominent in his selection of topics, and
as his long, late work on The Life of Napoleon (1828-30) attests, his sense
of the political world continued until the end to be defined by the issues
of the Revolution. That those who wrote about the Revolution often tended to
discuss it in terms of abstractions such as “political justice” and “the
rights of man” did not make its consequences any less materially felt.
Interestingly, when Hazlitt moved in 1802 to Paris, where he lived for ten
years, he attempted to pursue a career as a painter. He would later call his
political sketches in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a “gallery” of
portraits, and one of his important contributions to English critical
terminology--the notion of “gusto”--had to do precisely with a capacity for
apprehending things in their concreteness: “Gusto in art is power or passion
defining any object.”
Hazlitt had no taste of the abstract speculation. At the time he met the
poets, Hazlitt was reading such
empiricists as
David Hume and thinking his
way through a work of moral philosophy that he published in 1805 as An Essay
on the Principles of Human Action. In the Essay, which adumbrated critical
positions that would later prove both inimical to Wordsworth and influential
for John Keats, Hazlitt extended the skeptical argument about personal
identity in the direction of William Godwin’s doctrine of benevolence. He
developed a strong analogy between what separates us from others and what
separates us from our own future selves in order to suggest that we may be
theoretically as disinterested in our own future affairs as we are in the
affairs of others (and, conversely, as interested in others as in our own
future selves). “Interest,” in its many interconnected senses, would indeed
remain a crucial notion for many of Hazlitt’s critical studies. His best
work couples an appreciation for aesthetic power with analyses of how such
power served political power and how it resisted it.
Essays
Among his writings of essays, the best include Characters of Shakespeare’s
plays (1817-18), Lectures on the English poets (1818-19) and The spirit of
the age (1825).
A good discussion on the power of imagination can be found in Hazlitt’s
mordant Letter to William Gifford (1819), whom he called “the Government
Critic . . . the invisible link that connects literature with the police”. A
good discussion of its resistance to power appears in On Poetry in General,
one of the Lectures on the English Poets (1818).
Both of these last pieces belong to the period of Hazlitt’s finest writing.
True, some of the later success is adumbrated in his early essays published
under the title The Eloquence of the British Senate (1807), especially in
the telling account of the style of Burke. After 1812, however, Hazlitt took
the critical essay to a level it had never reached before and--as if to
confirm his view that “the arts are not progressive”--arguably has not
approached since. The immediate impetus to this new phase of Hazlitt’s work
was Leigh Hunt’s suggestion in1812 that they together publish a series of
pieces in Hunt’s Examiner “in the manner of the periodical Essayists, the
Spectator and Tatler.” Hazlitt devoted a full lecture to “the Periodical
Essayists” in his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), and what he
says about their work tells much about his.
What Hazlitt found in Richard Steele and Joseph Addison--ultimately in
Montaigne--was a critical mode answerable to the empiricism of the Humean
moral philosophy to which he had committed himself, and it became the
critical mode of his own best writing. We must look to Hazlitt, not for a
critical system, but for a body of “nice distinctions” and “liberal
constructions” as capacious as any critical imagination has had to offer.
Hazlitt’s philosophical orientation makes his relation to Coleridge a matter
of special interest in the history of English criticism, for Hume’s
empiricism was one of the prominent targets of Coleridge’s influential
theorizing. Hazlitt’s acknowledgment that Coleridge gave him the language in
which to express himself suggests that while Hazlitt’s practical work may
not be governed by an aprioristic theory of poetry or imagination, it was
carried out in the light of what such a theory might be and do. In perhaps
his best-known work, The Spirit of the Age, certain notions such as
“contradiction” and “character”, as well as “the spirit of the age” itself,
achieve a quasi-technical status. The essays gain force both from the
idealist philosophical associations carried by those terms and from the
refusal to allow these associations to realize the expectations they raise.
No identifiable “spirit of the age” emerges from the “contemporary
portraits” assembled in that volume, and no resolute pattern emerges from
what Hazlitt calls the “spirit of contradiction”, which is kept constantly
in play. Hazlitt’s essays frequently defeat expectations of consistency by
disrespecting the distinction between persons and principles. For any
literary portrait he painted, and especially for those in The Spirit of the
Age, he achieved an astonishing fusion of what eighteenth-century criticism
held apart under the paired rubrics “moral” and “poetical” characters. Hazlitt’s observations led him to look for an author’s characteristic
weaknesses in the same areas as his distinctive strengths: Coleridge’s
ability to see all sides of a question goes hand in hand with his incapacity
for action, Wordsworth’s “hebetude of intellect” with his strength of
sympathy.
Hazlitt stands among the best early essayists in not attempting to construct
a particularized persona. The staccato sequence of unconjoined clauses marks
another feature of this style, and since, as he said, an editor abhors an
ellipsis, it was a feature that had to be fought for. Together with the
conversational unpredictability and the penchant for apparently irrelevant
(and often misquoted) allusion, this feature of Hazlitt’s writing enabled
him to claim for himself what he saw in his hero Montaigne: “the courage to
say as an author what he felt as man.” His prose became an object of clubby,
nostalgic admiration for later writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson (“We
are all of us fine fellows, but none of us writes like Hazlitt” [quoted in
Bromwich 3]), but it was a great obstacle to many of Hazlitt’s
contemporaries and was taken by hostile critics as an index of his political
and intellectual
anarchism. Hazlitt courted such charges in sentences that
enacted what they described: “Every word should be a blow; every thought
should instantly grapple with its fellow.” Not the least part of his
critical legacy, Hazlitt’s style attempted, for all it was worth, to guard
the power of what he wrote, and wrote about, against appropriation by what
he called the “tyrants” and the “toad-eaters” alike.
|
