129- ) English Literature
William Hazlitt
Journalist, essayist, and Liber Amoris (1812–1823)
Journalist
In
October 1812, Hazlitt was hired by The Morning Chronicle as a parliamentary
reporter. Soon he met John Hunt, publisher of The Examiner, and his younger
brother Leigh Hunt, the poet and essayist, who edited the weekly paper. Hazlitt
admired both as champions of liberty, and befriended especially the younger
Hunt, who found work for him. He began to contribute miscellaneous essays to
The Examiner in 1813, and the scope of his work for the Chronicle was expanded
to include drama criticism, literary criticism, and political essays. In 1814
The Champion was added to the list of periodicals that accepted Hazlitt's
by-now profuse output of literary and political criticism. A critique of Joshua
Reynolds' theories about art appeared there as well, one of Hazlitt's major
forays into art criticism.
Having
by 1814 become established as a journalist, Hazlitt had begun to earn a
satisfactory living. A year earlier, with the prospect of a steady income, he
had moved his family to a house at 19 York Street, Westminster, which had been
occupied by the poet John Milton, whom Hazlitt admired above all English poets
except Shakespeare. As it happened, Hazlitt's landlord was the philosopher and
social reformer Jeremy Bentham. Hazlitt was to write extensively about both
Milton and Bentham over the next few years.
His
circle of friends expanded, though he never seems to have been particularly
close with any but the Lambs and to an extent Leigh Hunt and the painter
Benjamin Robert Haydon. His low tolerance for any who, he thought, had
abandoned the cause of liberty, along with his frequent outspokenness, even
tactlessness, in social situations made it difficult for many to feel close to
him, and at times he tried the patience of even Charles Lamb. In The Examiner
in late 1814, Hazlitt was the first to provide a critique of Wordsworth's poem
The Excursion (Hazlitt's review appeared weeks before Francis Jeffrey's
notorious dismissal of the poem with the words "This will never do").
He lavished extreme praise on the poet—and equally extreme censure. While
praising the poem's sublimity and intellectual power, he took to task the
intrusive egotism of its author. Clothing landscape and incident with the
poet's personal thoughts and feelings suited this new sort of poetry very well;
but his abstract philosophical musing too often steered the poem into
didacticism, a leaden counterweight to its more imaginative flights.
Wordsworth, who seems to have been unable to tolerate anything less than
unqualified praise , was enraged, and relations between the two became cooler
than ever.
Though
Hazlitt continued to think of himself as a "metaphysician", he began
to feel comfortable in the role of journalist. His self-esteem received an
added boost when he was invited to contribute to the quarterly The Edinburgh
Review (his contributions, beginning in early 1815, were frequent and regular
for some years), the most distinguished periodical on the Whig side of the
political fence (its rival The Quarterly Review occupied the Tory side).
Writing for so highly respected a publication was considered a major step up
from writing for weekly papers, and Hazlitt was proud of this connection.
On
18 June 1815, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. Having idolised Napoleon for
years, Hazlitt took it as a personal blow. The event seemed to him to mark the
end of hope for the common man against the oppression of "legitimate"
monarchy. Profoundly depressed, he took up heavy drinking and was reported to
have walked around unshaven and unwashed for weeks.] He idolised and spoiled
his son, William Jr., but in most respects his household grew increasingly
disordered over the following year: his marriage deteriorated, and he spent
more and more time away from home. His part-time work as a drama critic
provided him with an excuse to spend his evenings at the theatre. Afterwards he
would then tarry with those friends who could tolerate his irascibility, the
number of whom dwindled as a result of his occasionally outrageous behaviour.
Hazlitt
continued to produce articles on miscellaneous topics for The Examiner and
other periodicals, including political diatribes against any who he felt
ignored or minimised the needs and rights of the common man. Defection from the
cause of liberty had become easier in light of the oppressive political
atmosphere in England at that time, in reaction to the French Revolution and
the Napoleonic Wars. The Hunts were his primary allies in opposing this
tendency. Lamb, who tried to remain uninvolved politically, tolerated his
abrasiveness, and that friendship managed to survive, if only just barely in
the face of Hazlitt's growing bitterness, short temper, and propensity for hurling
invective at friends and foes alike.
For
relief from all that weighed on his mind, Hazlitt became a passionate player at
a kind of racquet ball similar to the game of Fives (a type of handball of
which he was a fan) in that it was played against a wall. He competed with
savage intensity, dashing around the court like a madman, drenched in sweat,
and was accounted a good player. More than just a distraction from his woes,
his devotion to this pastime led to musings on the value of competitive sports
and on human skill in general, expressed in writings like his notice of the
"Death of John Cavanagh" (a celebrated Fives player) in The Examiner
on 9 February 1817, and the essay "The Indian Jugglers" in Table-Talk
(1821).
Early
in 1817, forty of Hazlitt's essays that had appeared in The Examiner in a
regular column called "The Round Table", along with a dozen pieces by
Leigh Hunt in the same series, was collected in book form. Hazlitt's
contributions to The Round Table were written somewhat in the manner of the
periodical essays of the day, a genre defined by such eighteenth-century
magazines as The Tatler and The Spectator.
The
far-ranging eclectic variety of the topics treated would typify his output in
succeeding years: Shakespeare ("On the Midsummer Night's Dream"),
Milton ("On Milton's Lycidas"), art criticism ("On Hogarth's
Marriage a-la-mode"), aesthetics ("On Beauty"), drama criticism
("On Mr. Kean's Iago"; Hazlitt was the first critic to champion the
acting talent of Edmund Kean), social criticism ("On the Tendency of
Sects", "On the Causes of Methodism", "On Different Sorts
of Fame").
There
was an article on The Tatler itself. Mostly his political commentary was
reserved for other vehicles, but included was a "Character of the Late Mr.
Pitt", a scathing characterisation of the recently deceased former Prime
Minister. Written in 1806, Hazlitt liked it well enough to have already had it
printed twice before (and it would appear again in a collection of political
essays in 1819).
Some
essays blend Hazlitt's social and psychological observations in a calculatedly
thought-provoking way, presenting to the reader the "paradoxes" of
human nature. The first of the collected essays, "On the Love of
Life", explains, "It is our intention, in the course of these papers,
occasionally to expose certain vulgar errors, which have crept into our
reasonings on men and manners.... The love of life is ... in general, the
effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions".
Again,
in "On Pedantry", Hazlitt declares that "The power of attaching
an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits ... is one of the greatest
happinesses of our nature". In "On Different Sorts of Fame",
"In proportion as men can command the immediate and vulgar applause of
others, they become indifferent to that which is remote and difficult of
attainment". And in "On Good-Nature", "Good nature, or what
is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues...."
Many
of the components of Hazlitt's style begin to take shape in these Round Table
essays. Some of his "paradoxes" are so hyperbolic as to shock when
encountered out of context: "All country people hate each other", for
example, from the second part of "On Mr. Wordsworth's Excursion". He
interweaves quotations from literature old and new, helping drive his points
home with concentrated allusiveness and wielded extraordinarily efficiently as
a critical instrument. Yet, although his use of quotations is (as many critics
have felt) as fine as any author's has ever been, all too often he gets the
quotes wrong. In one of his essays on Wordsworth he misquotes Wordsworth
himself:
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of glory in the grass , of splendour in the
flower....
(See
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.)
Though
Hazlitt was still following the model of the older periodical essayists, these
quirks, together with his keen social and psychological insights, began here to
coalesce into a style very much his own.
Success—and
trouble
In
the meantime, Hazlitt's marriage continued its downward spiral; he was writing
furiously for several periodicals to make ends meet; waiting so far in vain for
the collection The Round Table to be issued as a book (which it finally was in
February 1817); suffering bouts of illness; and making enemies by his venomous
political diatribes. He found relief by a change of course, shifting the focus
of his analysis from the acting of Shakespeare's plays to the substance of the
works themselves. The result was a collection of critical essays entitled
Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817).
His
approach was something new. There had been criticisms of Shakespeare before,
but either they were not comprehensive or they were not aimed at the general
reading public. As Ralph Wardle put it, before Hazlitt wrote this book,
"no one had ever attempted a comprehensive study of all of Shakespeare,
play by play, that readers could read and reread with pleasure as a guide to
their understanding and appreciation". Somewhat loosely organised, and
even rambling, the studies offer personal appreciations of the plays that are
unashamedly enthusiastic. Hazlitt does not present a measured account of the
plays' strengths and weaknesses, as did Dr. Johnson, or view them in terms of a
"mystical" theory, as Hazlitt thought his contemporary A.W. Schlegel
did (though he approves of many of Schlegel's judgements and quotes him
liberally). Without apology, he addresses his readers as fellow lovers of
Shakespeare and shares with them the beauties of what he thought the finest
passages of the plays he liked best.
Readers
took to it, the first edition selling out in six weeks. It received favourable
reviews as well, not only by Leigh Hunt, whose bias as a close friend might be
questioned, but also by Francis Jeffrey, the editor of The Edinburgh Review, a
notice that Hazlitt greatly appreciated. Though he contributed to that
quarterly, and corresponded with its editor on business, he had never met
Jeffrey, and the two were in no sense personal friends. For Jeffrey, the book
was not so much a learned study of Shakespeare's plays as much as a loving and
eloquent appreciation, full of insight, which displayed "considerable
originality and genius".
This
critical and popular acclaim offered Hazlitt the prospect of getting out of
debt, and allowed him to relax and bask in the light of his growing fame. In
literary circles however, his reputation had been tarnished in the meantime: he
had openly taken both Wordsworth and Coleridge to task on personal grounds and
for failing to fulfill the promise of their earlier accomplishments, and both
were apparently responsible for retaliatory rumours which seriously damaged
Hazlitt's repute. And the worst was yet to come.
Nonetheless
Hazlitt's satisfaction at the relief he gained from his financial woes was
supplemented by the positive response his return to the lecture hall received.
In early 1818 he delivered a series of talks on "the English Poets",
from Chaucer to his own time. Though somewhat uneven in quality, his lectures
were ultimately judged a success. In making arrangements for the lectures, he
had met Peter George Patmore, Assistant Secretary of the Surrey Institution
where the lectures were presented. Patmore soon became a friend as well as
Hazlitt's confidant in the most troubled period of the latter's life.
The
Surrey Institution lectures were printed in book form, followed by a collection
of his drama criticism, A View of the English Stage, and the second edition of
Characters of Shakespear's Plays. Hazlitt's career as a lecturer gained some
momentum, and his growing popularity allowed him to get a collection of his
political writings published as well, Political Essays, with Sketches of Public
Characters. Lectures on "the English Comic Writers" soon followed,
and these as well were published in book form. He then delivered lectures on
dramatists contemporary with Shakespeare, which were published as Lectures on
the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. This series of talks did not
receive the public acclaim that his earlier lectures had, but were reviewed
enthusiastically after they were published.
More
trouble was brewing, however. Hazlitt was attacked brutally in The Quarterly
Review and Blackwood's Magazine, both Tory publications. One Blackwood's
article mocked him as "pimpled Hazlitt", accused him of ignorance,
dishonesty, and obscenity, and incorporated vague physical threats. Though
Hazlitt was rattled by these attacks, he sought legal advice and sued. The
lawsuit against Blackwood's was finally settled out of court in his favour. Yet
the attacks did not entirely cease. The Quarterly Review issued a review of
Hazlitt's published lectures in which he was condemned as ignorant and his
writing as unintelligible. Such partisan onslaughts brought spirited responses.
One, unlike an earlier response to the Blackwood's attack that never saw the
light of day, was published, as A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. (1819;
Gifford was the editor of the Quarterly). The pamphlet, notable also for
deploying the term ultracrepidarian, which Hazlitt himself may have coined,
amounts to an apologia for his life and work thus far and showed he was well
able to defend himself. Yet Hazlitt's attackers had done their damage. Not only
was he personally shaken, he found it more difficult to have his works
published, and once more he had to struggle for a living.
Solitude and infatuation
His
lecturing in particular had drawn to Hazlitt a small group of admirers. Best
known today is the poet John Keats, who not only attended the lectures but
became Hazlitt's friend in this period. The two met in November 1816 through
their mutual friend, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and were last seen
together in May 1820 at a dinner given by Haydon. In those few years before the
poet's untimely death, the two read and admired each other's work, and Keats,
as a younger man seeking guidance, solicited Hazlitt's advice on a course of
reading and direction in his career. Some of Keats's writing, particularly his
key idea of "negative capability", was influenced by the concept of
"disinterested sympathy" he discovered in Hazlitt, whose work the
poet devoured. Hazlitt, on his part, later wrote that of all the younger
generation of poets, Keats showed the most promise, and he became Keats's first
anthologist when he included several of Keats's poems in a collection of
British poetry he compiled in 1824, three years after Keats's death.
Less
well known today than Keats were others who loyally attended his lectures and
constituted a small circle of admirers, such as the diarist and chronicler
Henry Crabb Robinsonand the novelist Mary Russell Mitford. But the rumours that
had been spread demonising Hazlitt, along with the vilifications of the Tory
press, not only hurt his pride but seriously obstructed his ability to earn a
living. Income from his lectures had also proved insufficient to keep him
afloat.
His
thoughts drifted to gloom and misanthropy. His mood was not improved by the
fact that by now there was no pretence of keeping up appearances: his marriage
had failed. Years earlier he had grown resigned to the lack of love between him
and Sarah. He had been visiting prostitutes and displayed more idealised
amorous inclinations toward a number of women whose names are lost to history.
Now in 1819, he was unable to pay the rent on their rooms at 19 York Street and
his family were evicted. That was the last straw for Sarah, who moved into
rooms with their son and broke with Hazlitt for good, forcing him to find his
own accommodation. He would sometimes see his son and even his wife, with whom
he remained on speaking terms, but they were effectively separated.
At
this time Hazlitt would frequently retreat for long periods to the countryside
he had grown to love since his marriage, staying at the "Winterslow
Hut", a coaching inn at Winterslow, near a property his wife owned. This
was both for solace and to concentrate on his writing. He explained his
motivation as one of not wanting to withdraw completely but rather to become an
invisible observer of society, "to become a silent spectator of the mighty
scene of things ... to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing
in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with
it." Thus, for days on end, he would shut himself away and write for
periodicals, including the recently re-established (1820) London Magazine, to
which he contributed drama criticism and miscellaneous essays.
One
idea that particularly bore fruit was that of a series of articles called
"Table-Talk". (Many were written expressly for inclusion in the book
of the same name, Table-Talk; or, Original Essays, which appeared in different
editions and forms over the next few years.) These essays, structured in the
loose manner of table talk, were written in the "familiar style" of
the sort devised two centuries earlier by Montaigne, whom Hazlitt greatly
admired. The personal "I" was now substituted for the editorial
"we" in a careful remodulation of style that carried the spirit of
these essays far from that of the typical eighteenth-century periodical essay,
to which he had more closely adhered in The Round Table. In a preface to a
later edition of Table-Talk, Hazlitt explained that in these essays he eschewed
scholarly precision in favour of a combination of the "literary and the
conversational". As in conversation among friends, the discussion would
often branch off into topics related only in a general way to the main theme,
"but which often threw a curious and striking light upon it, or upon human
life in general".
In
these essays, many of which have been acclaimed as among the finest in the
language, Hazlitt weaves personal material into more general reflections on
life, frequently bringing in long recollections of happy days of his years as
an apprentice painter (as in "On the Pleasure of Painting", written
in December 1820) as well as other pleasurable recollections of earlier years,
"hours ... sacred to silence and to musing, to be treasured up in the
memory, and to feed the source of smiling thoughts thereafter" ("On
Going a Journey", written January 1822).
Hazlitt
also had to spend time in London in these years. In another violent contrast, a
London lodging house was the stage on which the worst crisis of his life was to
play itself out.
In
August 1820, a month after his father's death at the age of 83, he rented a
couple of rooms in 9 Southampton Buildings in London from a tailor named
Micaiah Walker. Walker's 19-year-old daughter Sarah, who helped with the
housekeeping, would bring the new lodger his breakfast. Immediately, Hazlitt
became infatuated with Miss Walker, more than 22 years his junior. (Before much
longer, this "infatuation" turned into a protracted obsession.) His
brief conversations with Walker cheered him and alleviated the loneliness that
he felt from his failed marriage and the recent death of his father. He dreamed
of marrying her, but that would require a divorce from Sarah Hazlitt—no easy
matter. Finally, his wife agreed to grant him a Scottish divorce, which would
allow him to remarry (as he could not had he been divorced in England).
Sarah
Walker was, as some of Hazlitt's friends could see, a fairly ordinary girl. She
had aspirations to better herself, and a famous author seemed like a prize
catch, but she never really understood Hazlitt. When another lodger named
Tomkins came along, she entered into a romantic entanglement with him as well,
leading each of her suitors to believe he was the sole object of her affection.
With vague words, she evaded absolute commitment until she could decide which
she liked better or was the more advantageous catch.
Hazlitt
discovered the truth about Tomkins, and from then on his jealousy and
suspicions of Sarah Walker's real character afforded him little rest. For
months, during the preparations for the divorce and as he tried to earn a
living, he alternated between rage and despair, on the one hand, and the
comforting if unrealistic thought that she was really "a good girl"
and would accept him at last. The divorce was finalised on 17 July 1822, and
Hazlitt returned to London to see his beloved—only to find her cold and
resistant. They then become involved in angry altercations of jealousy and
recrimination. And it was over, though Hazlitt could not for some time persuade
himself to believe so. His mind nearly snapped. At his emotional nadir, he
contemplated suicide.
It
was with some difficulty that he eventually recovered his equilibrium. In order
to ascertain Sarah's true character, he persuaded an acquaintance to take
lodgings in the Walkers' building and attempt to seduce Sarah. Hazlitt's friend
reported that the attempt seemed to be about to succeed, but she prevented him
from taking the ultimate liberty. Her behaviour was as it had been with several
other male lodgers, not only Hazlitt, who now concluded that he had been
dealing with, rather than an "angel", an "impudent whore",
an ordinary "lodging house decoy". Eventually, though Hazlitt could
not know this, she had a child by Tomkins and moved in with him.
By
pouring out his tale of woe to anyone he happened to meet (including his
friends Peter George Patmore and James Sheridan Knowles), he was able to find a
cathartic outlet for his misery. But catharsis was also provided by his
recording the course of his love in a thinly disguised fictional account,
published anonymously in May 1823 as Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion.
(Enough clues were present so that the identity of the writer did not remain
hidden for long.)
Critics
have been divided as to the literary merits of Liber Amoris, a deeply personal
account of frustrated love that is quite unlike anything else Hazlitt ever
wrote. Wardle suggests that it was compelling but marred by sickly
sentimentality, and also proposes that Hazlitt might even have been
anticipating some of the experiments in chronology made by later novelists.
One
or two positive reviews appeared, such as the one in the Globe, 7 June 1823:
"The Liber Amoris is unique in the English language; and as, possibly, the
first book in its fervour, its vehemency, and its careless exposure of passion
and weakness—of sentiments and sensations which the common race of mankind seek
most studiously to mystify or conceal—that exhibits a portion of the most
distinguishing characteristics of Rousseau, it ought to be generally
praised".
However,
such complimentary assessments were the rare exception. Whatever its ultimate
merits, Liber Amoris provided ample ammunition for Hazlitt's detractors, and
even some of his closest friends were scandalised . For months he did not even
have contact with the Lambs. And the strait-laced Robinson found the book
"disgusting", "nauseous and revolting", "low and gross
and tedious and very offensive", believing that "it ought to exclude
the author from all decent society". As ever, peace of mind proved elusive
for William Hazlitt.
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