1778, born, April 10th, at Maidstone, Kent. 1783, taken to the United States of America by his parents. 1786, returns to England. 1793, a scholar in the Unitarian College, Hackney. 1802, an art student in Paris. 1805, publishes “Essay on the Principles of Human Action.” 1806, publishes “Free Thoughts on Public Affairs.” 1808, marries Miss Sarah Stoddart. 1812, lectures upon philosophy, before the Russell Institute, London. 1814, contributes to the Edinburgh Review. Theatrical critic of the Morning Chronicle. 1817, “The Round Table” published, the joint work of Leigh Hunt and himself. Publishes “Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays.” 1818, lectures upon the English poets, before the Surrey Institute, London. Publishes “A View of the English Stage.” 1819, lectures upon the English comic writers, before the Surrey Institute, London. 1820, lectures upon the dramatic literature of the age of Elizabeth, before the Surrey Institute, London. 1822, divorced from his wife. Writes for The Liberal. 1823, publishes “Liber Amoris.” 1824, marries Mrs. Bridgewater, a widow, and goes abroad with her. 1825, separated from his wife. Returns to England. Publishes “The Spirit of the Age.” 1828, publishes the “Life of Napoleon,” vols. 1 and 2. 1830, publishes the “Life of Napoleon,” vols. 3 and 4, and “Conversations of James Northcote.” Dies, September 18th.

Personal

  Heard Hazlitt’s first lecture on the “History of English Philosophy.” He seems to have no conception of the difference between a lecture and a book. What he said was sensible and excellent, but he delivered himself in a low, monotonous voice, with his eyes fixed on his MS., not once daring to look at his audience; and he read so rapidly that no one could possibly give to the matter the attention it required…. The cause of his reading so rapidly was, that he was told to limit himself to an hour, and what he had prepared would have taken three hours, if it had been read slowly.

  I found Hazlitt living in Milton’s house, the very one where he dictated his “Paradise Lost,” and occupying the room where, tradition says, he kept the organ on which he loved to play. I should rather say Hazlitt sat in it, for, excepting his table, three chairs, and an old picture, this enormous room was empty and unoccupied. It was white-washed, and all over the walls he had written in pencil short scraps of brilliant thoughts and phrases, half-lines of poetry, references, etc., in the nature of a commonplace-book. His conversation was much of the same kind, generally in short sentences, quick and pointed, dealing much in allusions, and relying a good deal on them for success; as, when he said, with apparent satisfaction, that Curran was the Homer of blackguards, and afterwards, when the political state of the world came up, said of the Emperor Alexander, that “he is the Sir Charles Grandison of Europe.” On the whole, he was more amusing than interesting, and his nervous manner shows that this must be his character. He is now nearly forty, and when quite young lived several years in America, chiefly in Virginia, but a little while at our Dorchester.

  I really believe Hazlitt to be a disinterested and suffering man, who feels public calamities as other men do private ones; and this is perpetually redeeming him in my eyes…. I know that Hazlitt does pocket up wrongs in this way, to draw them out again some day or other. He says it is the only comfort which the friends of his own cause leave him.

  I stood well with him for fifteen years (the proudest of my life), and have ever spoken my full mind of him to some, to whom his panegyric must naturally be least tasteful. I never in thought swerved from him, I never betrayed him, I never slackened in my admiration of him; I was the same to him (neither better nor worse), though he could not see it, as in the days when he thought fit to trust me. At this instant, he may be preparing for me some compliment, above my deserts, as he has sprinkled many such among his admirable books, for which I rest his debtor; or, for anything I know, or can guess to the contrary, he may be about to read a lecture on my weaknesses. He is welcome to them (as he was to my humble hearth), if they can divert a spleen, or ventilate a fit of sullenness. I wish he would not quarrel with the world at the rate he does; but the reconciliation must be affected by himself, and I despair of living to see that day. But, protesting against much that he has written, and some things which he chooses to do; judging him by his conversation which I enjoyed so long, and relished so deeply; or by his books, in those places where no clouding passion intervenes—I should belie my own conscience, if I said less, than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. So far from being ashamed of that intimacy, which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I was able for so many years to have preserved it entire; and I think I shall go to my grave without finding or expecting to find, such another companion.

  Poor Hazlitt! He, too, is one of the victims to the Moloch Spirit of this Time…. In Hazlitt, as in Byron and Burns and so many others in their degree, there lay some tone of the “eternal melodies,” which he could not fashion into terrestrial music, but which uttered itself only in harsh jarrings and inarticulate cries of pain. Poor Hazlitt. There is one star less in the heavens, though a twinkling, dimmed one; while the street-lamps and horn lanterns are all burning, with their whale-oil or coal gas, as before!

  In person, Mr. Hazlitt was of the middle size, with a handsome and eager countenance, worn by sickness and thought; and dark hair, which had curled stiffly over the temples, and was only of late years sprinkled with gray. His gait was slouching and awkward, and his dress neglected; but when he began to talk he could not be mistaken for a common man. In the company of persons with whom he was not familiar his bashfulness was painful; but when he became entirely at ease, and entered on a favourite topic, no one’s conversation was ever more delightful. He did not talk for effect, to dazzle, or surprise, or annoy, but with the most simple and honest desire to make his view of the subject entirely apprehended by his hearer.

  A friend of his it was,—a friend wishing to love him, and admiring him almost to extravagance,—who told me, in illustration of the dark sinister gloom which sate forever upon Hazlitt’s countenance and gestures, that involuntarily, when Hazlitt put his hand within his waistcoat (as a mere unconscious trick of habit), he himself felt a sudden recoil of fear, as from one who was searching for a hidden dagger. Like “a Moor of Malabar,” as described in the “Faery Queen,” at intervals Hazlitt threw up his angry eyes and dark locks, as if wishing to affront the sun, or to search the air for hostility. And the same friend, on another occasion, described the sort of feudal fidelity to his belligerent duties which in company seemed to animate Hazlitt, as though he were mounting guard on all the citadels of malignity, under some sacramentum militare, by the following trait,—that, if it happened to Hazlitt to be called out of the room, or to be withdrawn for a moment from the current of the general conversation by a fit of abstraction, or by a private whisper to himself from some person sitting at his elbow, always, on resuming his place as a party to what might be called the public business of the company, he looked round him with a mixed air of suspicion and defiance, such as seemed to challenge everybody by some stern adjuration into revealing whether, during his own absence or inattention, anything had been said demanding condign punishment at his hands. “Has any man uttered or presumed to insinuate,” he seemed to insist upon knowing, “during this interregnum, things that I ought to proceed against as treasonable to the interests which I defend?”

  On knocking at the door [No. 19 York Street, Westminster], it was, after a long interval, opened by a sufficiently “neat-handed” domestic. The outer door led immediately from the street (down a step) into an empty apartment, indicating an uninhabited house, and I supposed I had mistaken the number; but on asking for the object of my search, I was shown to a door, which opened (a step from the ground) on to a ladder-like staircase, bare like the rest, which led to a dark, bare landing-place and thence to a large square wainscoted apartment. The great curtainless windows of this room looked upon some dingy trees; the whole of the wall over and about the chimney-piece was entirely covered, up to the ceiling, by names written in pencil, of all sizes and characters, and in all directions, commemorative of visits of curiosity “to the home of Pindarus” (John Milton). There was, near to the empty fireplace a table with breakfast things upon it (though it was two o’clock in the afternoon). Three chairs and a sofa were standing about the room, and one unbound book lay on the mantlepiece. At the table sat Hazlitt, and on the sofa, a lady whom I found to be his wife.

  Mr. Hazlitt’s life was particularly an intellectual one…. His personal and moral infirmities were the result of several combining circumstances; and his life displayed a continual conflict between a magnificent intellect and morbid, miserly physical influences…. On his behalf, if any new plea were capable of being urged, it would be this: that his irrepressible love of truth, and abhorrence of disguise in any shape or under any circumstances, have been the means of laying bare before us much that other men would have shrunk instinctively from divulging. We are bound to recollect that he has opened his whole heart to us; and allowances are to be made for that confessed addiction to taking the extreme view, and sailing over-closely to the wind.

  Hazlitt was of the middle size, with eager, expressive eyes; near which his black hair, sprinkled sparely with gray, curled round in a wiry, resolute manner. His gray eyes, not remarkable in color, expanded into great expression when occasion demanded it. Being very shy, however, they often evaded your steadfast look. They never (as has been asserted by some one) had a sinister expression; but they sometimes flamed with indignant glances, when their owner was moved to anger; like the eyes of other angry men. At home, his style of dress (or undress) was perhaps slovenly, because there was no one to please; but he always presented a very clean and neat appearance when he went abroad. His mode of walking was loose, weak and unsteady; although his arms displayed strength, which he used to put forth when he played at rackets with Martin Burney and others.

  I do not propose to write even a sketch of Hazlitt’s life, for apart from its matrimonial infelicities, it was uneventful. What interest it had was literary, for except when he labored under the delusion that he was a painter, a delusion which Thackeray shared when young, he was a man of letters, and nothing else. His inclination was towards metaphysics, his forte was criticism. He was an admirable critic, though rather intolerant to the moderns, and the most brilliant and eloquent essayist that ever committed his thoughts to paper. A vein of autobiography runs through his writings, which is not the least of their charms. We share his tastes, his sympathies, his prejudices even, and are inspired by a warm personal feeling. We do not love him, as we do Lamb, but we respect him as the profounder thinker. His life was a warfare, and his death, which occurred in his fifty-third year, was a release. His last words were, “Well, I’ve had a happy life.”

  Under that straightforward, hard-hitting, direct-telling manner of his, both in writing and speaking, Hazlitt had a depth of gentleness—even tenderness—of feeling on certain subjects; manly friendship, womanly sympathy, touched him to the core; and any token of either would bring a sudden expression into his eyes very beautiful as well as very heart-stirring to look upon. We have seen this expression more than once, and can recall its appealing charm, its wonderful irradiation of the strong features and squarely-cut, rugged under-portion of the face.

  I did not like Hazlitt: nobody did. He was out of place at the genial gatherings at Highgate; though he was often there: for genial he certainly was not. He wrote with a pen dipped in gall, and had a singularly harsh and ungentle look; seeming indeed as if his sole business in life was to seek for faults. He was a leading literary and art critic of his time; but he has left to posterity little either to guide or instruct. I recall him as a small, mean-looking, unprepossessing man; but I do not quite accept Haydon’s estimate of him—“a singular compound of malice, candor, cowardice, genius, purity, vice, democracy, and conceit.” Lamb said of him, that he was, “in his natural state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing.” I prefer the portrait of De Quincey: “He smiled upon no man!” He was a democrat, a devout admirer of the first Napoleon; and (I again quote De Quincey) “hated even more than enemies those whom custom obliged him to call friends.” His was the common lot of critics—few friends, many foes. His son, a very estimable gentleman, is one of the Judges in the Court of Bankruptcy.

  He was not a safe man to confide in. He had a forked crest which he sometimes lifted.

  Our evenings at the theatres brought us frequently into companionship with that super-excellent critic, William Hazlitt, who was likewise occupied in writing theatrical notices,—those for the “Times” newspaper. It was always a treat to sit beside him, when he talked delightfully; and once, on going to his own lodging, he showed us a copy he had made of Titian’s “Ippolito dei Medici,” and conversed finely upon Titian’s genius. Hazlitt’s gift in painting was remarkable. A portrait he took of his old nurse,—a mere head,—the upper part of the face in strong shadow from an over-pending black silk bonnet edged with black lace, while the wrinkled cheeks, the lines about the mouth, with the touches of actual and reflected light, were given with such vigour, truth, as well might recall the style of the renowned Flemish master, and actually did cause a good judge of the art to say to Hazlitt,—“Where did you get that Rembrandt?”

  Like so many another fierce combatant with the pen, he was a shy, timid, and morbidly, horribly sensitive creature. But shy, self-absorbed, diffident before others, he was at bottom proud, scornful, brimming over with every form of stirring and tumultuous passion. He himself spoke of himself as “the king of good haters”—which, indeed, he was not; for your real hater doth never unpack his heart with words; and our poor Hazlitt was constantly assailing some literary or political antipathy as a little blacker than Satan, and more destructive than sin. His strong personality can be read between every line that he wrote.

Liber Amoris, 1823

  Hazlitt at present gives me great pain by the folly with which he is conducting himself. He has fallen in love to a pitch of insanity, with a lodging-house hussy, who will be his death. He has been to Scotland and divorced his wife, although he has a fine little boy by her; and after doing this, to marry this girl, he comes back and finds she has been making a fool of him in order to get presents, and in reality has been admitting a lover more favored. Hazlitt’s torture is beyond expression; you may imagine it. The girl really excited in him a pure, devoted, and intense love. His imagination clothed her with that virtue which her affected modesty induced him to believe in, and he is really downright in love with an ideal perfection, which has no existence but in his own head! He talks of nothing else day and night. He has written down all the conversations without color, literal as they happened; he has preserved all the love-letters, many of which are equal to anything of the sort, and really affecting; and I believe, in order to ease his soul of this burden, means, with certain arrangements, to publish it as a tale of character. He will sink into idiotcy if he does not get rid of it. Poor Hazlitt! He who makes so free with the follies of his friends, is of all mortals the most open to ridicule. To hear him repeat in a solemn tone and with agitated mouth the things of love he said to her (to convince you that he made love in the true gallant way), to feel the beauty of the sentiment, and then look up and see his old, hard, weather-beaten, saturnine, metaphysical face—the very antidote of the sentiment—twitching all sorts of ways, is really enough to provoke a saint to laughter. He has a notion that women have never liked him. Since this affair he has dressed in the fashion, and keeps insinuating his improved appearance. He springs up to show you his pantaloons! What a being it is! His conversation is now a mixture of disappointed revenge, passionate remembrances, fiendish hopes, and melting lamentations.

  Still, apart from its preface, the book is by no means to be regarded even as a work of fiction founded upon fact. It deals with truth. It relates, with an exaggeration due to excited feeling, rather than to the romancist’s straining after effect, a very remarkable episode in the life of its author. Nor was its publication due simply to a writer’s desire, born of his necessity very often, to capitalise his emotions, as it were: to throw his experiences, his sorrows and his sufferings into the marketable form of manuscript, and to dispose of that on the most favourable terms obtainable. In Hazlitt’s case publicity was a medicine to his condition of mind. Owing to a train of circumstances, and to inherent mental peculiarities, his imagination had become distinctly diseased. It was a relief to him to give the history of his trials and troubles to the printing-press and the world; to deliver himself from his cares and pains in the ordinary way of literary work…. Little more has here been set forth than a chapter in the story of William Hazlitt’s life as he has himself related it in the “New Pygmalion;” not a book upon which the reader’s judgment of its author should be permanently founded, yet affording, nevertheless, a valuable clue to the character of a very remarkable man.

  Hazlitt paints her as a vision of rarest beauty, somewhat undeveloped and soulless, but into whom, like Pygmalion, his devotion would infuse life and soul. The truth seems to be, that his statue was a vulgar young woman, accustomed to flirt with the lodgers who came under her mother’s roof, and that she could no more understand the feeling with which she was regarded by a man of genius than she could have returned it if it had been comprehensible to her.

General

  He seems pretty generally, indeed, in a state of happy intoxication—and has borrowed from his great original, not indeed the force and brilliancy of his fancy, but something of its playfulness, and a large share of his apparent joyousness and self-indulgence in its exercise. It is evidently a great pleasure to him to be fully possessed with the beauties of his author, and to follow the impulse of his unrestrained eagerness to impress them upon his readers.

  Hazlitt had damned the bigoted and the blue-stockinged; how durst the man! He is your only good damner, and if ever I am damned, I should like him to damn me.

  We are not apt to imbibe half opinions, or to express them by halves; we shall, therefore, say at once, that when Mr. Hazlitt’s taste and judgment are left to themselves, we think him among the best, if not the very best, living critic on our national literature…. As we have not scrupled to declare that we think Mr. Hazlitt is sometimes the very best living critic, we shall venture one step farther, and add, that we think he is sometimes the very worst. One would suppose he had a personal quarrel with all living writers, good, bad, or indifferent. In fact, he seems to know little about them, and to care less. With him, to be alive is not only a fault in itself, but it includes all other possible faults. He seems to consider life as a disease, and death as your only doctor. He reverses the proverb, and thinks a dead ass is better than a living lion. In his eyes, death, like charity, “covereth a multitude of sins.” In short if you want his praise, you must die for it; and when such praise is deserved, and given really con amore, it is almost worth dying for.

  Though Mr. Hazlitt frequently shows great talent and taste, he is not qualified for the task he has undertaken. In the midst of what is good in him, he mistakes so grossly, that we are led to suspect that he has often picked up his opinions as well as his words from others, and that when he fails, it is when he relies upon himself. He is in the midst of men of genius in London, where it is no hard thing with a good memory and some smartness, and no conscience about thefts, to put together such a book as this. Of his conduct in life we know nothing; nor if we did should we speak of it, unless we might fairly with praise; neither do we altogether like giving an opinion of a man’s secret principles and disposition, from his writings; yet we must say that Mr. Hazlitt appears too loose in the one, and too envious and spleeny, where there is room for it, in the other, to treat with a correct understanding and a right delicacy and truth of feeling and sentiment, upon a subject like poetry which concerns all that is moral and refined and intellectual in our natures. He is much too full of himself to have a sincere love and interest for what is abstractly good and great, and more intent upon displaying his own fine parts, than spreading before his readers the excellencies of others.

  He (Schlegel) is like Hazlitt, in English, who talks pimples—a red and white corruption rising up (in little imitation of mountains upon maps), but containing nothing, and discharging nothing, except their own humours.

  Mr. Hazlitt’s character as a writer may, we think, be not inaptly designated by a term borrowed from the vocabulary of our transatlantic brethren, which though cacophonous, is sufficiently expressive. We would venture to recommend its importation and adoption into the language of this island, for the particular use of such persons as we have enumerated above: they must be too partial to the produce of a Republican soil, to be displeased with the application. The word to which we allude, Slangwhanger, is interpreted in the American dictionary to be “One who makes use of political or other gabble, vulgarly called slang, that serves to amuse the rabble.” Those who peruse the “Table Talk” will determine how far the definition answers to the case in point; they will observe also the truth of a remark often made, that the disciples of the Radical School lose no opportunity of insinuating their poison into all sorts of subjects; a drama, a novel, a poem, an essay, or a school-book, is in their hands an equally convenient vehicle.

  Compare Charles Lamb’s exquisite criticisms on Shakspere with Hazlitt’s round and round imitations of them.

  Such was the power of beauty in Hazlitt’s mind; and the interfusing faculty was wanting. The spirit, indeed, was willing, but the flesh was strong; and when these contend it is not difficult to foretell which will obtain the mastery; for “the power of beauty shall sooner transform honesty from what it is into a bawd, than the power of honesty shall transform beauty into its likeness.”

  I suspect that half which the unobservant have taken literally, he meant, secretly, in sarcasm. As Johnson in conversation, so Hazlitt in books, pushed his own theories to the extreme, partly to show his power, partly, perhaps, from contempt of the logic of his readers. He wrote rather for himself than others; and often seems to vent all his least assured and most uncertain thoughts—as if they troubled him by the doubts they inspired, and his only anxiety was to get rid of them. He had a keen sense of the Beautiful and Subtle; and what is more, he was deeply imbued with sympathies for the Humane. He ranks high amongst the social writers—his intuitive feeling was in favour of the multitude;—yet had he nothing of the demagogue in literature; he did not pander to a single vulgar passion.

  With the exception of William Hazlitt, England has produced no Shakespearian critic of any importance…. His mind was as brilliant as it was deep, a combination of Diderot and Börne, full of warm enthusiasm for the Revolution, coupled with an earnest love of art, always overflowing with verve and esprit!

  An acute but somewhat bitter observer of life and manners, and satirized rather than described them. Though bold and arrogant in the expression of his opinions, and continually provoking opposition by the hardihood of his paradoxes, he does not appear to have been influenced so much by self-esteem as sensibility. He was naturally shy and despairing of his own powers, and his dogmatism was of that turbulent kind which comes from passion and self-distrust. He had little repose of mind or manner, and in his works almost always appears as if his faculties had been stung and spurred into action.

  In critical disquisitions on the leading characters and works of the drama, he is not surpassed in the whole range of English literature; and what in an especial manner commands admiration in their perusal is the indication of refined taste and chastened reflection which they contain, and which are more conspicuous in detached passages than in any entire work. He appears greater when quoted than when read. Possibly, had his life been prolonged, it might have been otherwise, and some work emanated from his gifted pen which would have placed his fame on a durable foundation.

  Hazlitt was, in many respects, the most natural of critics. He was born to criticise, not in a small and captious way, but as a just, generous, although stern and rigorous judge. Nature had denied him great constructive, or dramatic, or synthetic power—the power of the highest kind of poet or philosopher. But he possessed that mixture in proper proportions of the acute and the imaginative, the profound and the brilliant, the cool and the enthusiastic, which goes to constitute the true critic. Hence his criticism is a fine compound—pleasing, on the one hand, the lover of analysis, who feels that its power can go no farther; and, on the other, the young and ardent votary of literature, who feels that Hazlitt has expressed in language what he only could “with the faltering tongue and the glistening eye.”

  Everything which he observed he seemed to observe from a certain soreness of mind: he looked at people because they offended him; he had the same vivid notion of them that a man has of objects which grate on a wound in his body.

  A brilliant and refined critic.

  When Hazlitt is at his best, what critic can excel him in eloquence and discrimination.

  Among English essayists William Hazlitt is distinguished for his psychological revelations. Less companionable than Steele, less erudite than De Quincey, without Addison’s classic culture and Leigh Hunt’s bonhomie, he is more introspective than any one of these. The speculative exceeds the literary element in his equipment. To think rather than to learn was his prevalent tendency; intuition rather than acquisition was his resource. The cast of his mind, the quality of his temperament, and the nature of his experience combined to make him thoughtful, individual, and earnest; more abstract than social, more intent than discursive, more original than accomplished, he contributed ideas instead of fantasies, and vindicated opinions instead of tastes. Zest was his inspiration; that intellectual pleasure which comes from idiosyncrasies, moods, convictions, he both felt and imparted in a rare degree; he thirsted for truth; he was jealous of his independence; he was a devotee of freedom. In him the animal and intellectual were delicately fused. Few such voluminous writers have been such limited readers.

  He did not criticise in cold blood…. His criticisms of his contemporaries seem to us to be, taken all in all, neither more nor less just than his criticisms of departed poets, comic writers, and dramatists. In all his criticisms alike he strikes us as a man of extravagant sentiment and hyperbolical expression, widely read in philosophy and in general literature, a habitual and acute student of human character, more alive to varieties of excellence than any of his critical contemporaries, excepting De Quincey and John Wilson, and more, perhaps, than even these, alive to what may be called varieties of mood. His judgment was liable to be “deflected” by intemperate feeling, generous or splentic. His criticisms must be taken with some grains of allowance on this score before we appreciate their substantial body of sound discernment. He often puts things graphically and incisively; but his composition strikes the general taste of critics as wearing too much an appearance of effort, and straining too much at flashing effects.

  A versatile and refined critic, rather paradoxical at times, but who always hits the mark.

  Hazlitt held those extreme radical opinions which, fifty years since, were upheld by many others; and the warmth of his temper led him to denounce things and systems to which he had a strong aversion. Subject to the faults arising out of this his warm temperament, he possessed qualities worthy of affection and respect. He was a simple, unselfish man, void of all deception and pretence; and he had a clear, acute intellect, when not traversed by some temporary passion or confused by a strong prejudice…. He loved the worker better than the idler. He hated pretensions supported merely by rank or wealth or repute, or by the clamor of factions. And he felt love and hatred in an intense degree. But he was never dishonest. He never struck down the weak, nor trod on the prostrate. He was never treacherous, never tyrannical, never cruel.

  Hazlitt’s cynicism is the souring of a generous nature; and when we turn from the politician to the critic and the essayist, our admiration for his powers is less frequently jarred by annoyance at their wayward misuse…. Hazlitt’s point of view was rather different, nor can we ascribe to him without qualification that exquisite appreciation of purely literary charm which is so rare and so often affected. Nobody, indeed, loved some authors more heartily or understood them better; his love is so hearty that he cannot preserve the true critical attitude. Instead of trying them on his palate, he swallows them greedily. His judgment of an author seems to depend upon two circumstances. He is determined in great measure by his private associations, and in part by his sympathy for the character of the writer. His interest in this last sense is, one may say, rather psychological than purely critical…. Hazlitt harps a good deal upon one string; but that string vibrates forcibly. His best passages are generally an accumulation of short, pithy sentences, shaped in strong feeling, and coloured by picturesque association; but repeating, rather than corroborating, each other. The last blow goes home, but each falls on the same place. He varies the phrase more than the thought; and sometimes he becomes obscure, because he is so absorbed in his own feelings that he forgets the very existence of strangers who require explanation. Read through Hazlitt, and this monotony becomes a little tiresome; but dip into him at intervals, and you will often be astonished that so vigorous a writer has not left some more enduring monument of his remarkable powers.

  Hazlitt’s opinions of his contemporaries were as worthless as his strong prejudices could make them.

  Occupied a considerable place among his contemporaries, though none of his works were of a kind to live. He was not a poet or a philosopher, but a literary man in the closest sense of the word, impelled by circumstances and a vehement and lively intelligence to do such work as he was capable of in this fashion, rather than constrained by a higher necessity to utter what was in him for the advantage of men…. Hazlitt had no philosophy and no story; he was an essayist, a critic, a commentator upon other men’s works and ways, rather than an original performer…. In his case the proverb does net tell, which declares that a poet must be born and not made—for he is not a poet, and his chances of commanding anything more than a present audience depend upon his thorough cultivation and knowledge. Hazlitt did not possess these qualities, and his books are already as old as if they had been written a thousand years ago, instead of half a hundred.

  There never was such an epicure of his moods as Hazlitt.

  He stood for individualism. He wrote from what was, in the highest degree for his purpose, a full mind, and with that blameless conscious superiority which a full mind must needs feel in this empty world. His whole intellectual stand is taken on the positive and concrete side of things…. He delivers an opinion with the air proper to a host who is master of a vineyard, and can furnish name and date to every flagon he unseals.

  I believe it was Hazlitt whom I read first, and he helped me to clarify and formulate my admiration of Shakespeare as no one else had yet done.

  If not the greatest critic of his time, Hazlitt is one of the greatest; and his greatness consists in this—that he had “the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man.” With Coleridge and Lamb he introduced the new method. Literary criticism had been a scratching of the surface. They turned up the soil and showed the fresh earth; and Hazlitt was not the least lusty husbandman of the three.

  In him, much more distinctly than in Hunt or Lamb, a modern spirit is apparent. Save for a certain exuberance of style, there is nothing in his essays to suggest even now the flavour of antiquity; he approached his subjects with perfect originality and freshness; his style cannot be definitely linked to any prototype; and, as critics of his own day were quick to observe, “his taste was not the creature of schools and canons, it was begotten of Enthusiasm by Thought.” It is enthusiasm, indeed, that is the most obvious characteristic of the essays—and they are his best essays—which he contributed between 1820 and 1830 to the “Examiner” and other papers…. If not the first, he was the most influential of those who bent the essay to this purely literary purpose, and he may be regarded as standing midway between the old essayists and the new. It was a fashion in his own time, and one that has often since been followed, to insist too strongly on Hazlitt’s limitations as a critic. Yet, after all has been said, his method was essentially the same as Sainte-Beuve’s, and his essays cannot even now be safely neglected by students of the literary developments with which they deal. It is impossible to read them without catching something of the ardour of his own enthusiasm, and it says much for the soundness of his taste and judgment that the great majority of his criticisms emerged undistorted from the glowing crucible of his thought.

  His fine critical powers were marred by the strain of bitterness in his nature. And the result is that his judgment on many poets, and notably the poets of his own day, too often sounds like an intelligent version of the Edinburgh or the Quarterly. Or, to speak more accurately, he betrays some tendency to return to principles which, though assuredly applied in a more generous spirit, are at bottom hardly to be distinguished from the principles of Johnson. He too has his “indispensable laws,” or something very like them. He too has his bills of exclusion and his list of proscriptions. The poetry of earth, he more than suspects, is forever dead; after Milton, no claimant is admitted to anything more substantial than a courtesy title. This, no doubt, was in part due to his morose temper; but it was partly also the result of the imperfect method with which he started. The fault of his conception—and it was that which determined his method—is to be too absolute. It allows too much room to poetry in the abstract; too little to the ever-varying temperament of the individual poet.

  Hazlitt was beyond all question a great, a very great, critic—in not a few respects our very greatest. All his work, or almost all that has much merit, is small in individual bulk, though the total is very respectable…. Great as Hazlitt was as a miscellaneous and Montaignesque essayist, he was greater as a literary critic. Literature was, though he coquetted with art, his first and most constant love; it was the subject on which, as far as English literature is concerned (and he knew little and is still less worth consulting about any other), he had acquired the largest and soundest knowledge; and it is that for which he had the most original and essential genius. His intense prejudices and his occasional inadequacy make themselves felt here as they do everywhere, and even here it is necessary to give the caution that Hazlitt is never to be trusted when he shows the least evidence of dislike for which he gives no reason. But to any one who has made a little progress in criticism himself, to any one who has either read for himself or is capable of reading for himself, of being guided by what is helpful and of neglecting what is not, there is no greater critic than Hazlitt in any language. He will sometimes miss—he is never perhaps so certain as his friends Lamb and Hunt were to find—exquisite in individual points. Prejudice, accidental ignorance, or other causes may sometimes invalidate his account of authors or of subjects in general. But still the four great collections of his criticism, “The Characters of Shakespeare,” “The Elizabethan Dramatists,” “The English Poets,” and “The English Comic Writers,” with not a few scattered things in his other writings, make what is on the whole the best corpus of criticism by a single writer in English on English. He is the critics’ critic as Spenser is the poets’ poet; that is to say, he has, errors excepted and deficiencies allowed, the greatest proportion of the strictly critical excellencies—of the qualities which make a critic—that any English writer of his craft has ever possessed.

  The four volumes [“Life of Napoleon”] certainly abound with magnificent passages, and when we look at the amount of technical detail and the fund of information brought together from scattered sources, we can hardly fail to admire the literary workmanship and intellectual penetration which are conspicuous throughout, and the power of the book is the more impressive when we recollect that it was produced under immense disadvantages and in declining health. He had never attempted anything on the same scale before: and he happened to undertake the task when he was, physically speaking, least qualified to carry it successfully out.

  Hazlitt’s proper work was to analyse genius. During these apparently desultory years his critical power, fed by immense reading and incessant thought, steadily matured; and when, in 1814, he made his decisive entry into literature, it was with a mind not only formed but fixed. He was one of the men who do not develop through a series of phases, but after an obscure incubation suddenly emerge complete. He was fond of saying that he had done all his work in early manhood, and merely written off his mind in his books. As a critic, too, he disdained the type of intellect which improves (“an improving poet never becomes a great one”), and was peculiarly lacking in the faculty which forsees the flower in the seed. He had no vestige of Coleridge’s sense for the organic; and the “sinewy texture” of his ideas stands in sharp contrast to the iridescent web of Coleridge’s shifting creeds.

  He never quite disabuses our mind of the belief that he is a paid advocate; he never conquers by calm; and, upon the whole, impresses one as a man who found little worth the living for in this world, and counted upon very little in any other.

  Gracious rills from the Hazlitt watershed have flowed in all directions, fertilising a dry and thirsty land…. In both poetry and prose Hazlitt’s preferences were frankly avowed and his dislikes outspoken. He never hesitated to say as an author what he felt as a man. He belonged to no school or coterie. His knowledge and taste for poetry was increased and purified by his friendship with Lamb; and he had felt the stimulus of Coleridge in poetry as well as in metaphysics and politics, but he remained his own man—a solitary and independent figure. He liked Blair’s “Grave” and Warton’s Sonnets, and he said so. Sir Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia” bored him to death, and he said so. Sir Thomas Browne’s strained fancifulness and jargonised speech teased him, and he said so. On the other hand, what member of the Anglican Church has so bathed the name of Jeremy Taylor in the sunshine of eloquent appreciation as he has this Jacobinical son of a Socinian preacher?… We know what his point of view was, and can flatter ourselves upon our ability, real or supposed, to outline his judgments upon the books, pictures, and plays of to-day. For a critic to be alive eighty years after publication of his criticisms is in itself a feat. Hazlitt can say with the Abbé, J’ai vécu…. Hazlitt was never more philosophical than when in a passion. He always gets a good thought-basis for his hatreds…. Hazlitt was unhappily, unlike Sir Joshua Reynolds, a vulnerable man; and if he was hit hard and below the belt, he hit back again as hard as he could, and sometimes I am afraid below the belt.