130-) English Literature

130-) English Literature

William Hazlitt

Return to philosophy, second marriage, and tour of Europe (1823–1825)

Philosopher, again

There were times in this turbulent period when Hazlitt could not focus on his work. But often, as in his self-imposed seclusion at Winterslow, he was able to achieve a "philosophic detachment", and he continued to turn out essays of remarkable variety and literary merit, most of them making up the two volumes of Table-Talk . (A number were saved for later publication in The Plain Speaker in 1826, while others remained uncollected .)

Some of these essays were in large part retrospectives on the author's own life ("On Reading Old Books" [1821], for example, along with others mentioned above). In others, he invites his readers to join him in gazing at the spectacle of human folly and perversity ("On Will-making" [1821], or "On Great and Little Things" [1821], for example). At times he scrutinises the subtle workings of the individual mind (as in "On Dreams" [1823]); or he invites us to laugh at harmless eccentricities of human nature ("On People with One Idea" [1821]).

Other essays bring into perspective the scope and limitations of the mind, as measured against the vastness of the universe and the extent of human history ("Why Distant Objects Please" [1821/2] and "On Antiquity" [1821] are only two of many). Several others scrutinise the manners and morals of the age (such as "On Vulgarity and Affectation", "On Patronage and Puffing", and "On Corporate Bodies" [all 1821]).

Many of these "Table-Talk" essays display Hazlitt's interest in genius and artistic creativity. There are specific instances of literary or art criticism (for example "On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin" [1821] and "On Milton's Sonnets" [1822]) but also numerous investigations of the psychology of creativity and genius ("On Genius and Common Sense" [1821], "Whether Genius Is Conscious of Its Powers" [1823], and others).[146] In his manner of exploring an idea by antitheses (for example, "On the Past and the Future" [1821], "On the Picturesque and Ideal" [1821]),[147] he contrasts the utmost achievements of human mechanical skill with the nature of artistic creativity in "The Indian Jugglers" [1821].

Hazlitt's fascination with the extremes of human capability in any field led to his writing "The Fight" (published in the February 1822 New Monthly Magazine). This essay never appeared in the Table-Talk series or anywhere else in the author's lifetime. This direct, personal account of a prize fight, commingling refined literary allusions with popular slang, was controversial in its time as depicting too "low" a subject. Written at a dismal time in his life—Hazlitt's divorce was pending, and he was far from sure of being able to marry Sarah Walker—the article shows scarcely a trace of his agony. Not quite like any other essay by Hazlitt, it proved to be one of his most popular, was frequently reprinted after his death, and nearly two centuries later was judged to be "one of the most passionately written pieces of prose in the late Romantic period".

Another article written in this period, "On the Pleasure of Hating" (1823; included in The Plain Speaker), is on one level a pure outpouring of spleen, a distillation of all the bitterness of his life to that point. He links his own vitriol, however, to a strain of malignity at the core of human nature:

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others.

To one twentieth-century critic, Gregory Dart, this self-diagnosis by Hazlitt of his own misanthropic enmities was the sour and surreptitiously preserved offspring of Jacobinism. Hazlitt concludes his diatribe by refocusing on himself: "...have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough".

Not only do the "Table-Talk" essays frequently display "trenchant insights into human nature", they at times reflect on the vehicle of those insights and of the literary and art criticism that constitute some of the essays. "On Criticism" (1821) delves into the history and purposes of criticism itself; and "On Familiar Style" (1821 or 1822) reflexively explores at some length the principles behind its own composition, along with that of other essays of this kind by Hazlitt and some of his contemporaries, like Lamb and Cobbett.

In Table-Talk, Hazlitt had found the most congenial format for this thoughts and observations. A broad panorama of the triumphs and follies of humanity, an exploration of the quirks of the mind, of the nobility but more often the meanness and sheer malevolence of human nature, the collection was knit together by a web of self-consistent thinking, a skein of ideas woven from a lifetime of close reasoning on life, art, and literature. He illustrated his points with bright imagery and pointed analogies, among which were woven pithy quotations drawn from the history of English literature, primarily the poets, from Chaucer to his contemporaries Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats. Most often, he quoted his beloved Shakespeare and to a lesser extent Milton. As he explained in "On Familiar Style", he strove to fit the exact words to the things he wanted to express and often succeeded—in a way that would bring home his meaning to any literate person of some education and intelligence.

These essays were not quite like anything ever done before. They attracted some admiration during Hazlitt's lifetime, but it was only long after his death that their reputation achieved full stature, increasingly often considered among the best essays ever written in English. Nearly two centuries after they were written, for example, biographer Stanley Jones deemed Hazlitt's Table-Talk and The Plain Speaker together to constitute "the major work of his life", and critic David Bromwich called many of these essays "more observing, original, and keen-witted than any others in the language".

In 1823 Hazlitt also published anonymously Characteristics: In the Manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims, a collection of aphorisms modelled explicitly, as Hazlitt noted in his preface, on the Maximes (1665–1693) of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld. Never quite as cynical as La Rochefoucauld's, many, however, reflect his attitude of disillusionment at this stage of his life. Primarily, these 434 maxims took to an extreme his method of arguing by paradoxes and acute contrasts. For example, maxim "CCCCXXVIII":

There are some persons who never succeed, from being too indolent to undertake anything; and others who regularly fail, because the instant they find success in their power, they grow indifferent, and give over the attempt.

But they also lacked the benefit of Hazlitt's extended reasoning and lucid imagery, and were never included among his greatest works.

Recovery and second marriage

At the beginning of 1824, though worn out by thwarted passion and the venomous attacks on his character following Liber Amoris, Hazlitt was beginning to recover his equilibrium. Pressed for money as always, he continued to write for various periodicals, including The Edinburgh Review. To The New Monthly Magazine he supplied more essays in the "Table-Talk" manner, and he produced some art criticism, published in that year as Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries of England.

He also found relief, finally, from the Sarah Walker imbroglio. In 1823, Hazlitt had met Isabella Bridgwater (née Shaw), who married him in March or April 1824, of necessity in Scotland, as Hazlitt's divorce was not recognised in England. Little is known about this Scottish-born widow of the Chief Justice of Grenada, or about her interaction with Hazlitt. She may have been attracted to the idea of marrying a well-known author. For Hazlitt, she offered an escape from loneliness and to an extent from financial worries, as she possessed an independent income of £300 per annum. The arrangement seems to have had a strong element of convenience for both of them. Certainly Hazlitt nowhere in his writings suggests that this marriage was the love match he had been seeking, nor does he mention his new wife at all. In fact, after three and half years, tensions likely resulting from (as Stanley Jones put it) Hazlitt's "improvidence", his son's dislike of her, and neglect of his wife due to his obsessive absorption in preparing an immense biography of Napoleon, resulted in her abrupt departure, and they never lived together again.

For now, in any case, the union afforded the two of them the opportunity to travel. First, they toured parts of Scotland, then, later in 1824, began a European tour lasting over a year.

The Spirit of the Age

Before Hazlitt and his new bride set off for the continent, he submitted, among the miscellany of essays that year, one to the New Monthly on "Jeremy Bentham", the first in a series entitled "Spirits of the Age". Several more of the kind followed over the next few months, at least one in The Examiner. Together with some newly written, and one brought in from the "Table-Talk" series, they were collected in book form in 1825 as The Spirit of the Age: Or, Contemporary Portraits.

These sketches of twenty-five men, prominent or otherwise notable as characteristic of the age, came easily to Hazlitt. In his days as a political reporter he had observed many of them at close range. Others he knew personally, and for years their philosophy or poetry had been the subject of his thoughts and lectures.

There were philosophers, social reformers, poets, politicians, and a few who did not fall neatly into any of these categories. Bentham, Godwin, and Malthus, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron were some of the most prominent writers; Wilberforce and Canning were prominent in the political arena; and a few who were hard to classify, such as The Rev. Edward Irving, the preacher, William Gifford, the satirist and critic, and the recently deceased Horne Tooke, a lawyer, politician, grammarian, and wit.

Many of the sketches presented their subjects as seen in daily life. We witness, for example, Bentham "tak[ing] a turn in his garden" with a guest, espousing his plans for "a code of laws 'for some island in the watery waste'", or playing the organ as a relief from incessant musings on vast schemes to improve the lot of mankind. As Bentham's neighbour for some years, Hazlitt had had good opportunity to observe the reformer and philosopher at first hand.

 

He had already devoted years to pondering much of the thinking espoused by several of these figures. Thoroughly immersed in the Malthusian controversy, for example, Hazlitt had published A Reply to the Essay on Population as early as 1807, and the essay on Malthus is a distillation of Hazlitt's earlier criticisms.

Where he finds it applicable, Hazlitt brings his subjects together in pairs, setting off one against the other, although sometimes his complex comparisons bring out unexpected similarities, as well as differences, between temperaments that otherwise appear to be at opposite poles, as in his reflections on Scott and Byron. So too he points out that, for all the limitations of Godwin's reasoning, as given in that essay, Malthus comes off worse: "Nothing...could be more illogical...than the whole of Mr. Malthus's reasoning applied as an answer...to Mr. Godwin's book". Most distasteful to Hazlitt was the application of "Mr. Malthus's 'gospel'", greatly influential at the time. Many in positions of power had used Malthus's theory to deny the poor relief in the name of the public good, to prevent their propagating the species beyond the means to support it; while on the rich no restraints whatsoever were imposed.

Yet, softening the asperities of his critique, Hazlitt rounds out his sketch by conceding that "Mr. Malthus's style is correct and elegant; his tone of controversy mild and gentlemanly; and the care with which he has brought his facts and documents together, deserves the highest praise".

His portraits of such Tory politicians as Lord Eldon are unrelenting, as might be expected. But elsewhere his characterisations are more balanced, more even-tempered, than similar accounts in past years. Notably, there are portraits of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, which are, to an extent, essences of his former thoughts about these poets—and those thoughts had been profuse. He had earlier directed some of his most vitriolic attacks against them for having replaced the humanistic and revolutionary ideas of their earlier years with staunch support of the Establishment. Now he goes out of his way to qualify his earlier assessments.

In "Mr. Wordsworth", for example, Hazlitt notes that "it has been said of Mr. Wordsworth, that 'he hates conchology, that he hates the Venus of Medicis.'..." (Hazlitt's own words in an article some years back). Indirectly apologising for his earlier tirade, Hazlitt here brings in a list of writers and artists, like Milton and Poussin, for whom Wordsworth did show appreciation.

Coleridge, whom Hazlitt had once idolised, gets special attention, but, again, with an attempt to moderate earlier criticisms. At an earlier time Hazlitt had dismissed most of Coleridge's prose as "dreary trash". Much of The Friend was "sophistry". The Statesman's Manual was not to be read "with any patience". A Lay Sermon was enough to "make a fool...of any man". For betraying their earlier liberal principles, both Coleridge and Southey were "sworn brothers in the same cause of righteous apostacy".

Now, again, the harshness is softened, and the focus shifts to Coleridge's positive attributes. One of the most learned and brilliant men of the age, Coleridge may not be its greatest writer—but he is its "most impressive talker". Even his "apostacy" is somewhat excused by noting that in recent times, when "Genius stopped the way of Legitimacy...it was to be...crushed", regrettably but understandably leading many former liberals to protect themselves by siding with the powers that be.

Southey, whose political about-face was more blatant than that of the others, still comes in for a measure of biting criticism: "not truth, but self-opinion is the ruling principle of Mr. Southey's mind". Yet Hazlitt goes out of his way to admire where he can. For example, "Mr. Southey's prose-style can scarcely be too much praised", and "In all the relations and charities of private life, he is correct, exemplary, generous, just".

Hazlitt contrasts Scott and Byron; he skewers his nemesis Gifford; he praises—not without his usual strictures—Jeffrey; and goes on to portray, in one way or another, such notables as Mackintosh, Brougham, Canning, and Wilberforce.

His praise of the poet Thomas Campbell has been cited as one major instance where Hazlitt's critical judgement proved wrong. Hazlitt can scarcely conceal his enthusiasm for such poems as Gertrude of Wyoming, but neither the poems nor Hazlitt's judgement of them have withstood the test of time. His friends Hunt and Lamb get briefer coverage, and—Hazlitt was never one to mince words—they come in for some relatively gentle chiding amid the praise. One American author makes an appearance, Washington Irving, under his pen name of Geoffrey Crayon.

In this manner twenty-five character sketches combine to "form a vivid panorama of the age". Through it all, the author reflects on the Spirit of the Age as a whole, as, for example, "The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements".

Some critics have thought the essays in The Spirit of the Age highly uneven in quality and somewhat hastily thrown together, at best "a series of perceptive but disparate and impressionistic sketches of famous contemporaries". It has also been noted, however, that the book is more than a mere portrait gallery. A pattern of ideas ties them together. No thesis is overtly stated, but some thoughts are developed consistently throughout.

Roy Park has noted in particular Hazlitt's critique of excessive abstraction as a major flaw in the period's dominant philosophy and poetry. ("Abstraction", in this case, could be that of religion or mysticism as well as science.) This is the reason, according to Hazlitt, why neither Coleridge, nor Wordsworth, nor Byron could write effective drama. More representative of the finer spirit of the age was poetry that turned inward, focusing on individual perceptions, projections of the poets' sensibilities. The greatest of this type of poetry was Wordsworth's, and that succeeded as far as any contemporary writing could.

Even if it took a century and a half for many of the book's virtues to be realised, enough was recognised at the time to make the book one of Hazlitt's most successful. Unsurprisingly the Tory Blackwood's Magazine lamented that the pillory had fallen into disuse and wondered what "adequate and appropriate punishment there is that we can inflict on this rabid caitiff".[188] But the majority of the reviewers were enthusiastic. For example, the Eclectic Review marvelled at his ability to "hit off a likeness with a few artist-like touches" and The Gentleman's Magazine, with a few reservations, found his style "deeply impregnated with the spirit of the masters of our language, and strengthened by a rich infusion of golden ore...".

European tour

On 1 September 1824, Hazlitt and his wife began a tour of the European continent, crossing the English Channel by steamboat from Brighton to Dieppe and proceeding from there by coach and sometimes on foot to Paris and Lyon, crossing the Alps in Savoy, then continuing through Italy to Florence and Rome, the most southerly point on their route. Crossing the Apennines, they travelled to Venice, Verona, and Milan, then into Switzerland to Vevey and Geneva. Finally they returned via Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France again, arriving at Dover, England, on 16 October 1825.

There were two extended stops on this excursion: Paris, where the Hazlitts remained for three months; and Vevey, Switzerland, where they rented space in a farmhouse for three months. During those lengthy pauses, Hazlitt accomplished some writing tasks, primarily submitting an account of his trip in several instalments to The Morning Chronicle, which helped to pay for the trip. These articles were later collected and published in book form in 1826 as Notes of a Journey through France and Italy (despite the title, there is also much about the other countries he visited, particularly Switzerland).

This was an escape for a time from all the conflicts, the bitter reactions to his outspoken criticisms, and the attacks on his own publications back in England. And, despite interludes of illness, as well as the miseries of coach travel and the dishonesty of some hotel keepers and coach drivers, Hazlitt managed to enjoy himself. He reacted to his sight of Paris like a child entering a fairyland: "The approach to the capital on the side of St. Germain's is one continued succession of imposing beauty and artificial splendour, of groves, of avenues, of bridges, of palaces, and of towns like palaces, all the way to Paris, where the sight of the Thuilleries completes the triumph of external magnificence...."

He remained with his wife in Paris for more than three months, eagerly exploring the museums, attending the theatres, wandering the streets, and mingling with the people. He was especially glad to be able to return to the Louvre and revisit the masterpieces he had adored twenty years earlier, recording for his readers all of his renewed impressions of canvases by Guido, Poussin, and Titian, among others.

He also was pleased to meet and befriend Henri Beyle, now better known by his nom de plume of Stendhal, who had discovered much to like in Hazlitt's writings, as Hazlitt had in his.

Finally he and his wife resumed the journey to Italy. As they advanced slowly in those days of pre-railway travel (at one stage taking nearly a week to cover less than two hundred miles), Hazlitt registered a running commentary on the scenic points of interest. On the road between Florence and Rome, for example,

Towards the close of the first day's journey ... we had a splendid view of the country we were to travel, which lay stretched out beneath our feet to an immense distance, as we descended into the little town of Pozzo Borgo. Deep valleys sloped on each side of us, from which the smoke of cottages occasionally curled: the branches of an overhanging birch-tree or a neighbouring ruin gave relief to the grey, misty landscape, which was streaked by dark pine-forests, and speckled by the passing clouds; and in the extreme distance rose a range of hills glittering in the evening sun, and scarcely distinguishable from the ridge of clouds that hovered near them.

Hazlitt, in the words of Ralph Wardle, "never stopped observing and comparing. He was an unabashed sightseer who wanted to take in everything available, and he could recreate vividly all he saw".

Yet frequently he showed himself to be more than a mere sightseer, with the painter, critic, and philosopher in him asserting their influence in turn or at once. A splendid scene on the shore of Lake Geneva, for example, viewed with the eye of both painter and art critic, inspired the following observation: "The lake shone like a broad golden mirror, reflecting the thousand dyes of the fleecy purple clouds, while Saint Gingolph, with its clustering habitations, shewed like a dark pitchy spot by its side; and beyond the glimmering verge of the Jura ... hovered gay wreaths of clouds, fair, lovely, visionary, that seemed not of this world....No person can describe the effect; but so in Claude's landscapes the evening clouds drink up the rosy light, and sink into soft repose!"

Likewise, the philosopher in Hazlitt emerges in his account of the following morning: "We had a pleasant walk the next morning along the side of the lake under the grey cliffs, the green hills and azure sky....the snowy ridges that seemed close to us at Vevey receding farther into a kind of lofty background as we advanced.... The speculation of Bishop Berkeley, or some other philosopher, that distance is measured by motion and not by the sight, is verified here at every step".

He was also constantly considering the manners of the people and the differences between the English and the French (and later, to a lesser extent, the Italians and Swiss). Did the French really have a "butterfly, airy, thoughtless, fluttering character"? He was forced to revise his opinions repeatedly. In some ways the French seemed superior to his countrymen. Unlike the English, he discovered, the French attended the theatre reverently, respectfully, "the attention ... like that of a learned society to a lecture on some scientific subject". And he found culture more widespread among the working classes: "You see an apple-girl in Paris, sitting at a stall with her feet over a stove in the coldest weather, or defended from the sun by an umbrella, reading Racine and Voltaire".

Trying to be honest with himself, and every day discovering something new about French manners that confounded his preconceptions, Hazlitt was soon compelled to retract some of his old prejudices. "In judging of nations, it will not do to deal in mere abstractions", he concluded. "In countries, as well as individuals, there is a mixture of good and bad qualities; yet we attempt to strike a general balance, and compare the rules with the exceptions".

As he had befriended Stendhal in Paris, so in Florence, besides visiting the picture galleries, he struck up a friendship with Walter Savage Landor. He also spent much time with his old friend Leigh Hunt, now in residence there.

Hazlitt was ambivalent about Rome, the farthest point of his journey. His first impression was one of disappointment. He had expected primarily the monuments of antiquity. But, he asked, " what has a green-grocer's stall, a stupid English china warehouse, a putrid trattoria, a barber's sign, an old clothes or old picture shop or a Gothic palace ... to do with ancient Rome?" Further, "the picture galleries at Rome disappointed me quite". Eventually he found plenty to admire, but the accumulation of monuments of art in one place was almost too much for him, and there were also too many distractions. There were the "pride, pomp, and pageantry" of the Catholic religion, as well as having to cope with the "inconvenience of a stranger's residence at Rome....You want some shelter from the insolence and indifference of the inhabitants....You have to squabble with every one about you to prevent being cheated, to drive a hard bargain in order to live, to keep your hands and your tongue within strict bounds, for fear of being stilettoed, or thrown into the Tower of St. Angelo, or remanded home. You have much to do to avoid the contempt of the inhabitants....You must run the gauntlet of sarcastic words or looks for a whole street, of laughter or want of comprehension in reply to all the questions you ask....

Venice presented fewer difficulties, and was a scene of special fascination for him: "You see Venice rising from the sea", he wrote, "its long line of spires, towers, churches, wharfs ... stretched along the water's edge, and you view it with a mixture of awe and incredulity". The palaces were incomparable: "I never saw palaces anywhere but at Venice". Of equal or even greater importance to him were the paintings. Here there were numerous masterpieces by his favourite painter Titian, whose studio he visited, as well as others by Veronese, Giorgione, Tintoretto, and more.

On the way home, crossing the Swiss Alps, Hazlitt particularly desired to see the town of Vevey, the scene of Rousseau's 1761 novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, a love story that he associated with his disappointed love for Sarah Walker. He was so enchanted with the region even apart from its personal and literary associations that he remained there with his wife for three months, renting a floor of a farmhouse named "Gelamont" outside of town, where "every thing was perfectly clean and commodious". The place was for the most part an oasis of tranquility for Hazlitt. As he reported:

Days, weeks, months, and even years might have passed on much in the same manner.... We breakfasted at the same hour, and the tea-kettle was always boiling...; a lounge in the orchard for an hour or two, and twice a week we could see the steam-boat creeping like a spider over the surface of the lake; a volume of the Scotch novels..., or M. Galignani's Paris and London Observer, amused us till dinner time; then tea and a walk till the moon unveiled itself, "apparent queen of the night," or the brook, swoln with a transient shower, was heard more distinctly in the darkness, mingling with the soft, rustling breeze; and the next morning the song of peasants broke upon refreshing sleep, as the sun glanced among the clustering vine-leaves, or the shadowy hills, as the mists retired from their summits, looked in at our windows.

Hazlitt's time at Vevey was not passed entirely in a waking dream. As at Paris, and sometimes other stopping points such as Florence, he continued to write, producing one or two essays later included in The Plain Speaker, as well as some miscellaneous pieces. A side trip to Geneva during this period led him to a review of his Spirit of the Age, by Francis Jeffrey, in which the latter takes him to task for striving too hard after originality. As much as Hazlitt respected Jeffrey, this hurt (perhaps the more because of his respect), and Hazlitt, to work off his angry feelings, dashed off the only verse from his pen that has ever come to light, "The Damned Author's Address to His Reviewers", published anonymously on 18 September 1825, in the London and Paris Observer, and ending with the bitterly sardonic lines, "And last, to make my measure full,/Teach me, great J[effre]y, to be dull!"

Much of his time, however, was spent in a mellow mood. At this time he wrote "Merry England" (which appeared in the December 1825 New Monthly Magazine). "As I write this", he wrote, "I am sitting in the open air in a beautiful valley.... Intent upon the scene and upon the thoughts that stir within me, I conjure up the cheerful passages of my life, and a crowd of happy images appear before me".

The return to London in October was a letdown. The grey skies and bad food compared unfavorably with his recent retreat, and he was suffering from digestive problems (these recurred throughout much of his later life), though it was also good to be home. But he already had plans to return to Paris.

Return to London, trip to Paris, and last years (1825–1830)

"The old age of artists"

As comfortable as Hazlitt was on settling in again to his home on Down Street in London in late 1825 (where he remained until about mid-1827), the reality of earning a living again stared him in the face. He continued to provide a stream of contributions to various periodicals, primarily The New Monthly Magazine. The topics continued to be his favourites, including critiques of the "new school of reformers", drama criticism, and reflections on manners and the tendencies of the human mind. He gathered previously published essays for the collection The Plain Speaker, writing a few new ones in the process. He also oversaw the publication in book form of his account of his recent Continental tour.

But what he most wanted was to write a biography of Napoleon. Now Sir Walter Scott was writing his own life of Napoleon, from a strictly conservative point of view, and Hazlitt wanted to produce one from a countervailing, liberal perspective. Really, his stance on Napoleon was his own, as he had idolised Napoleon for decades, and he prepared to return to Paris to undertake the research. First, however, he brought to fruition another favourite idea.

Always fascinated by artists in their old age (see "On the Old Age of Artists"), Hazlitt was especially interested in the painter James Northcote, student and later biographer of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a Royal Academician. Hazlitt would frequently visit him—by then about 80 years old—and they conversed endlessly on men and manners, the illustrious figures of Northcote's younger days, particularly Reynolds, and the arts, particularly painting.

Northcote was at this time a crochety, slovenly old man who lived in wretched surroundings and was known for his misanthropic personality. Hazlitt was oblivious to the surroundings and tolerated the grumpiness. Finding congeniality in Northcote's company, and feeling many of their views to be in alignment, he transcribed their conversations from memory and published them in a series of articles entitled "Boswell Redivivus" in The New Monthly Magazine. (They were later collected under the title Conversations of James Northcote, Esq., R.A.) But there was little in common between these articles and Boswell's life of Johnson. Hazlitt felt such a closeness to the old artist that in his conversations, Northcote was transformed into a kind of alter ego. Hazlitt made no secret of the fact that the words he ascribed to Northcote were not all Northcote's own but sometimes expressed the views of Hazlitt as much as Hazlitt's own words.

Some of the conversations were little more than gossip, and they spoke of their contemporaries without restraint. When the conversations were published, some of those contemporaries were outraged. Northcote denied the words were his; and Hazlitt was shielded from the consequences to a degree by his residing in Paris, where he was at work on what he thought would be his masterpiece.

The last conversation (originally published in The Atlas on 15 November 1829, when Hazlitt had less than a year to live) is especially telling. Whether it really occurred more or less as given, or was a construct of Hazlitt's own imagination, it provides perspective on Hazlitt's own position in life at that time.

In words attributed to Northcote: "You have two faults: one is a feud or quarrel with the world, which makes you despair, and prevents you taking all the pains you might; the other is a carelessness and mismanagement, which makes you throw away the little you actually do, and brings you into difficulties that way."

Hazlitt justifies his own contrary attitude at length: "When one is found fault with for nothing, or for doing one's best, one is apt to give the world their revenge. All the former part of my life I was treated as a cipher; and since I have got into notice, I have been set upon as a wild beast. When this is the case, and you can expect as little justice as candour, you naturally in self-defence take refuge in a sort of misanthropy and cynical contempt for mankind."

 And yet on reflection, Hazlitt felt that his life was not so bad after all:

The man of business and fortune ... is up and in the city by eight, swallows his breakfast in haste, attends a meeting of creditors, must read Lloyd's lists, consult the price of consols, study the markets, look into his accounts, pay his workmen, and superintend his clerks: he has hardly a minute in the day to himself, and perhaps in the four-and-twenty hours does not do a single thing that he would do if he could help it. Surely, this sacrifice of time and inclination requires some compensation, which it meets with. But how am I entitled to make my fortune (which cannot be done without all this anxiety and drudgery) who do hardly any thing at all, and never any thing but what I like to do? I rise when I please, breakfast at length, write what comes into my head, and after taking a mutton-chop and a dish of strong tea, go to the play, and thus my time passes.

He was perhaps overly self-disparaging in this self-portrait, but it opens a window on the kind of life Hazlitt was leading at this time, and how he evaluated it in contrast to the lives of his more overtly successful contemporaries.

Hero worship

In August 1826, Hazlitt and his wife set out for Paris again, so he could research what he hoped would be his masterpiece, a biography of Napoleon, seeking "to counteract the prejudiced interpretations of Scott's biography". Hazlitt "had long been convinced that Napoleon was the greatest man of his era, the apostle of freedom, a born leader of men in the old heroic mould: he had thrilled to his triumphs over 'legitimacy' and suffered real anguish at his downfall".

This did not work out quite as planned. His wife's independent income allowed them to take lodgings in a fashionable part of Paris; he was comfortable, but also distracted by visitors and far from the libraries he needed to visit. Nor did he have access to all the materials that Scott's stature and connections had provided him with for his own life of Napoleon. Hazlitt's son also came to visit, and conflicts broke out between him and his father that also drove a wedge between Hazlitt and his second wife: their marriage was by now in free fall.

With his own works failing to sell, Hazlitt had to spend much time churning out more articles to cover expenses. Yet distractions notwithstanding, some of these essays rank among his finest, for example his "On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth", published in The Monthly Magazine (not to be confused with the similarly named New Monthly Magazine) in March 1827. The essay "On a Sun-Dial", which appeared late in 1827, may have been written during a second tour to Italy with his wife and son.

 On returning to London with his son in August 1827, Hazlitt was shocked to discover that his wife, still in Paris, was leaving him. He settled in modest lodgings on Half-Moon Street, and thereafter waged an unending battle against poverty, as he found himself forced to grind out a stream of mostly undistinguished articles for weeklies like The Atlas to generate desperately needed cash. Relatively little is known of Hazlitt's other activities in this period. He spent as much time, apparently, at Winterslow as he did in London. Some meditative essays emerged from this stay in his favourite country retreat, and he also made progress with his life of Napoleon. But he also found himself struggling against bouts of illness, nearly dying at Winterslow in December 1827. Two volumes—the first half—of the Napoleon biography appeared in 1828, only to have its publisher fail soon thereafter. This entailed even more financial difficulties for the author, and what little evidence we have of his activities at the time consists in large part of begging letters to publishers for advances of money.

The easy life he had spoken of to Northcote had largely vanished by the time that conversation was published about a year before his death. By then he was overwhelmed by the degradation of poverty, frequent bouts of physical as well as mental illness—depression —caused by his failure to find true love and by his inability to bring to fruition his defence of the man he worshipped as a hero of liberty and fighter of despotism.

Although Hazlitt retained a few devoted admirers, his reputation among the general public had been demolished by the cadre of reviewers in Tory periodicals whose efforts Hazlitt had excoriated in "On the Jealousy and the Spleen of Party". According to John Wilson of Blackwood's Magazine, for example, Hazlitt had already "been excommunicated from all decent society, and nobody would touch a dead book of his, any more than they would the body of a man who had died of the plague".

His four-volume life of Napoleon turned out to be a financial failure. Worse in retrospect, it was a poorly integrated hodgepodge of largely borrowed materials. Less than a fifth of his projected masterpiece consists of Hazlitt's own words. Here and there, a few inspired passages stand out, such as the following:

I have nowhere in any thing I may have written declared myself to be a Republican; nor should I think it worth while to be a martyr and a confessor to any form or mode of government. But what I have staked health and wealth, name and fame upon, and am ready to do so again and to the last gasp, is this, that there is a power in the people to change its government and its governors.

Hazlitt managed to complete The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte shortly before his death, but did not live to see it published in its entirety.

Last years

Few details remain of Hazlitt's daily life in his last years. Much of his time was spent by choice in the bucolic setting of Winterslow, but he needed to be in London for business reasons. There, he seems to have exchanged visits with some of his old friends, but few details of these occasions were recorded. Often he was seen in the company of his son and son's fiancée. Otherwise, he continued to produce a stream of articles to make ends meet.

In 1828, Hazlitt found work reviewing for the theatre again (for The Examiner). In playgoing he found one of his greatest consolations. One of his most notable essays, "The Free Admission", arose from this experience. As he explained there, attending the theatre was not merely a great solace in itself; the atmosphere was conducive to contemplating the past, not just memories of the plays themselves or his reviewing of past performances, but the course of his whole life. In words written within his last few months, the possessor of a free admission to the theatre, "ensconced in his favourite niche, looking from the 'loop-holes of retreat' in the second circle ... views the pageant of the world played before him; melts down years to moments; sees human life, like a gaudy shadow, glance across the stage; and here tastes of all earth's bliss, the sweet without the bitter, the honey without the sting, and plucks ambrosial fruits and amaranthine flowers (placed by the enchantress Fancy within his reach,) without having to pay a tax for it at the time, or repenting of it afterwards."

He found some time to return to his earlier philosophical pursuits, including popularised presentations of the thoughts expressed in earlier writings. Some of these, such as meditations on "Common Sense", "Originality", "The Ideal", "Envy", and "Prejudice", appeared in The Atlas in early 1830. At some point in this period he summarised the spirit and method of his life's work as a philosopher, which he had never ceased to consider himself to be; but "The Spirit of Philosophy" was not published in his lifetime. He also began contributing once again to The Edinburgh Review; paying better than the other journals, it helped stave off hunger.

After a brief stay on Bouverie Street in 1829, sharing lodgings with his son, Hazlitt moved into a small apartment at 6 Frith Street, Soho. He continued to turn out articles for The Atlas, The London Weekly Review, and now The Court Journal. Plagued more frequently by painful bouts of illness, he began to retreat within himself. Even at this time, however, he turned out a few notable essays, primarily for The New Monthly Magazine. Turning his suffering to advantage, he described the experience, with copious observations on the effects of illness and recovery on the mind, in "The Sick Chamber". In one of his last respites from pain, reflecting on his personal history, he wrote, "This is the time for reading. ... A cricket chirps on the hearth, and we are reminded of Christmas gambols long ago. ... A rose smells doubly sweet ... and we enjoy the idea of a journey and an inn the more for having been bed-rid. But a book is the secret and sure charm to bring all these implied associations to a focus. ... If the stage [alluding to his remarks in "The Free-Admission"] shows us the masks of men and the pageant of the world, books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. They are the first and last, the most home-felt, the most heart-felt of our enjoyments". At this time he was reading the novels of Edward Bulwer in hopes of reviewing them for The Edinburgh Review.

Such respites from pain did not last, though news of The Three Glorious Days that drove the Bourbons from France in July raised his spirits. A few visitors cheered these days, but, toward the end, he was frequently too sickto see any of them. By September 1830, Hazlitt was confined to his bed, with his son in attendance, his pain so acute that his doctor kept him drugged on opium much of the time. His last few days were spent in delirium, obsessed with some woman, which in later years gave rise to speculation: was it Sarah Walker? Or was it, as biographer Stanley Jones believes, more likely to have been a woman he had met more recently at the theatre? Finally, with his son and a few others in attendance, he died on 18 September. His last words were reported to have been "Well, I've had a happy life".

William Hazlitt was buried in the churchyard of St Anne's Church, Soho in London on 23 September 1830, with only his son William, Charles Lamb, P.G. Patmore, and possibly a few other friends in attendance.

Posthumous reputation

His works having fallen out of print, Hazlitt’s reputation declined. In the late 1990s his reputation was reasserted by admirers and his works reprinted. Two major works by others then appeared: The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style by Tom Paulin in 1998 and Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt by A. C. Grayling in 2000. Hazlitt's reputation has continued to rise, and now many contemporary thinkers, poets, and scholars consider him one of the greatest critics in the English language, and its finest essayist.

In 2003, following a lengthy appeal initiated by Ian Mayes together with A. C. Grayling, Hazlitt's gravestone was restored in St Anne's Churchyard, and unveiled by Michael Foot. A Hazlitt Society was then inaugurated. The society publishes an annual peer-reviewed journal called The Hazlitt Review.

 

The last place Hazlitt lived in, on Frith Street in London, is now a hotel, Hazlitt's.

The Jonathan Bate novel The Cure for Love (1998) was based indirectly on Hazlitt's life.

Bibliography

Selected works

An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) – Internet Archive

Free Thoughts on Public Affairs (1806) – Google Books

A Reply to the Essay on Population, by the Rev. T. R. Malthus (1807) – Internet Archive

The Round Table: A Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners (with Leigh Hunt; 1817) – Google Books

Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817) –  Wikisource.

Lectures on the English Poets (1818) – Google Books

A View of the English Stage (1818) – Google Books

Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) – Internet Archive

Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters (1819) –  Wikisource.

Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820) – Internet Archive

Table-Talk (1821–22; "Paris" edition, with somewhat different contents, 1825) –  Wikisource.

Characteristics: In the Manner of Rochefoucault's Maxims (1822) – Google Books

Liber Amoris: or, The New Pygmalion (1823) – Google Books

The Spirit of the Age (1825) –  Wikisource.

The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things (1826) – Volume I and Volume II on Google Books

Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy (1826) – Internet Archive

The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (four volumes; 1828–1830)

Selected posthumous collections

Literary Remains. Edited by William Carew Hazlitt. London: Saunders and Otley, 1836 – Internet Archive

Sketches and Essays. Edited by William Carew Hazlitt. London, 1839 – Internet Archive

Criticisms on Art. Edited by William Carew Hazlitt. London: C. Templeman, 1844 – Internet Archive

Winterslow: Essays and Characters. Edited by William Carew Hazlitt. London: David Bogue, 1850 – Internet Archive

The Collected Works of William Hazlitt. 13 vols. Edited by A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover, with an introduction by W. E. Glover. London: J. M. Dent, 1902–1906 – Internet Archive

Selected Essays. Edited by George Sampson. Cambridge: at the University Press, 1917 – Internet Archive

New Writings by William Hazlitt. Edited by P. P. Howe. London: Martin Secker, 1925 – HathiTrust

New Writings by William Hazlitt: Second Series. Edited by P. P. Howe. London: Martin Secker, 1927 – HathiTrust

Selected Essays of William Hazlitt, 1778–1830. Centenary ed. Edited by Geoffrey Keynes. London: Nonesuch Press, 1930, OCLC 250868603.

The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Centenary ed. 21 vols. Edited by P. P. Howe, after the edition of A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover. London: J. M. Dent, 1931–1934, OCLC 1913989.

The Hazlitt Sampler: Selections from his Familiar, Literary, and Critical Essays. Edited by Herschel Moreland Sikes. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1961, ASIN B0007DMF94.

Selected Writings. Edited by Ronald Blythe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970 [reissued 2009], ISBN 9780199552528.

The Letters of William Hazlitt. Edited by Herschel Moreland Sikes, assisted by Willard Hallam Bonner and Gerald Lahey. London: Macmillan, 1979, ISBN 9780814749869.

Selected Writings. Edited by Jon Cook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, ISBN 9780199552528.

The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt. 9 vols. Edited by Duncan Wu. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998, ISBN 9781851963690 – WorldCat.

The Fight, and Other Writings. Edited by Tom Paulin and David Chandler. London: Penguin Books, 2000, ISBN 9780140436136.

Metropolitan Writings. Edited by Gregory Dart. Manchester: Fyfield Books, 2005, ISBN 9781857547580.

New Writings of William Hazlitt. 2 vols. Edited by Duncan Wu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 9780199207060.

Other editors of Hazlitt include Frank Carr (1889), D. Nichol Smith (1901), Jacob Zeitlin (1913), Will David Howe (1913), Arthur Beatty (1919?), Charles Calvert (1925?), A. J. Wyatt (1925), Charles Harold Gray (1926), G. E. Hollingworth (1926), Stanley Williams (1937?), R. W. Jepson (1940), Richard Wilson (1942), Catherine Macdonald Maclean (1949), William Archer and Robert Lowe (1958), John R. Nabholtz (1970), Christopher Salvesen (1972), and R. S. White (1996).