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William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language,[1][2] placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell.[3][4] He is also acknowledged as the finest art critic of his age.[5] Despite his high standing among historians of literature and art, his work is currently little read and mostly out of print.[6][7]

William Hazlitt
Self-portrait from about 1802
Born(1778-04-10)10 April 1778
Maidstone, Kent, England
Died18 September 1830(1830-09-18) (aged 52)
Soho, London, England
Occupation
EducationNew College at Hackney
Notable works
Spouse
  • (m. 1808; div. 1822)
  • Isabella Bridgewater
    (m. 1824)
ChildrenWilliam Hazlitt
ParentsWilliam Hazlitt (father)
Relatives

During his lifetime he befriended many people who are now part of the 19th-century literary canon, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Stendhal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats.[8]

Life and works edit

Background edit

The family of Hazlitt's father were Irish Protestants who moved from the county of Antrim to Tipperary in the early 18th century. Also named William Hazlitt, Hazlitt's father attended the University of Glasgow (where he was taught by Adam Smith),[9] receiving a master's degree in 1760. Not entirely satisfied with his Presbyterian faith, he became a Unitarian minister in England. In 1764 he became pastor at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, where in 1766 he married Grace Loftus, daughter of a recently deceased ironmonger. Of their many children, only three survived infancy. The first of these, John (later known as a portrait painter), was born in 1767 at Marshfield in Gloucestershire, where the Reverend William Hazlitt had accepted a new pastorate after his marriage. In 1770, the elder Hazlitt accepted yet another position and moved with his family to Maidstone, Kent, where his first and only surviving daughter, Margaret (usually known as "Peggy"), was born that same year.[10]

Childhood, education, young philosopher (1778–1797) edit

Childhood edit

 
House in Wem, Shropshire where the Reverend William Hazlitt and his family lived between 1787 and 1813

William, the youngest of the surviving Hazlitt children, was born in Mitre Lane, Maidstone, in 1778. In 1780, when he was two, his family began a nomadic lifestyle that was to last several years. From Maidstone his father took them to Bandon, County Cork, Ireland; and from Bandon in 1783 to the United States, where the elder Hazlitt preached, lectured, and sought a ministerial call to a liberal congregation. His efforts to obtain a post did not meet with success, although he did exert a certain influence on the founding of the first Unitarian church in Boston.[11] In 1786–87 the family returned to England and settled in Wem, in Shropshire. Hazlitt would remember little of his years in America, save the taste of barberries.[12]

Education edit

Hazlitt was educated at home and at a local school. At age 13 he had the satisfaction of seeing his writing appear in print for the first time, when the Shrewsbury Chronicle published his letter (July 1791) condemning the riots in Birmingham over Joseph Priestley's support for the French Revolution.[13] In 1793 his father sent him to a Unitarian seminary on what was then the outskirts of London, the New College at Hackney (commonly referred to as Hackney College).[14] The schooling he received there, though relatively brief, approximately two years, made a deep and abiding impression on Hazlitt.[15]

The curriculum at Hackney was very broad, including a grounding in the Greek and Latin classics, mathematics, history, government, science, and, of course, religion.[16] Much of his education there was along traditional lines; however, the tutelage having been strongly influenced by eminent Dissenting thinkers of the day like Richard Price and Joseph Priestley,[17] there was also much that was nonconformist. Priestley, whom Hazlitt had read and who was also one of his teachers, was an impassioned commentator on political issues of the day. This, along with the turmoil in the wake of the French Revolution, sparked in Hazlitt and his classmates lively debates on these issues, as they saw their world being transformed around them.[18]

Changes were taking place within the young Hazlitt as well. While, out of respect for his father, Hazlitt never openly broke with his religion, he suffered a loss of faith, and left Hackney before completing his preparation for the ministry.[19]

Although Hazlitt rejected the Unitarian theology,[20] his time at Hackney left him with much more than religious scepticism. He had read widely and formed habits of independent thought and respect for the truth that would remain with him for life.[21] He had thoroughly absorbed a belief in liberty and the rights of man, and confidence in the idea that the mind was an active force which, by disseminating knowledge in both the sciences and the arts, could reinforce the natural tendency in humanity towards good. The school had impressed upon him the importance of the individual's ability, working both alone and within a mutually supportive community, to effect beneficial change by adhering to strongly held principles. The belief of many Unitarian thinkers in the natural disinterestedness of the human mind had also laid a foundation for the young Hazlitt's own philosophical explorations along those lines. And, though harsh experience and disillusionment later compelled him to qualify some of his early ideas about human nature, he was left with a hatred of tyranny and persecution that he retained to his dying days,[22] as expressed a quarter-century afterward in the retrospective summing up of his political stance in his 1819 collection of Political Essays: "I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools ... I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, and I have tried to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended."[23]

Young philosopher edit

Returning home, around 1795, his thoughts were directed into more secular channels, encompassing not only politics but, increasingly, modern philosophy, which he had begun to read with fascination at Hackney. In September 1794, he had met William Godwin,[24] the reformist thinker whose recently published Political Justice had taken English intellectual circles by storm. Hazlitt was never to feel entirely in sympathy with Godwin's philosophy, but it gave him much food for thought.[25] He spent much of his time at home in an intensive study of English, Scottish, and Irish thinkers like John Locke, David Hartley, George Berkeley, and David Hume, together with French thinkers like Claude Adrien Helvétius, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Baron d'Holbach.[26] From this point onwards, Hazlitt's goal was to become a philosopher. His intense studies focused on man as a social and political animal and, in particular, on the philosophy of mind, a discipline that would later be called psychology.

It was in this period also that he came across Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who became one of the most important influences on the budding philosopher's thinking. He also familiarized himself with the works of Edmund Burke, whose writing style impressed him enormously.[27] Hazlitt then set about working out a treatise, in painstaking detail, on the "natural disinterestedness of the human mind".[28] It was Hazlitt's intention to disprove the notion that man is naturally selfish (benevolent actions being rationally modified selfishness, ideally made habitual), a premise fundamental to much of the moral philosophy of Hazlitt's day.[29] The treatise was finally published only in 1805. In the meantime the scope of his reading had broadened and new circumstances had altered the course of his career. Yet, to the end of his life, he would consider himself a philosopher.[30]

Around 1796, Hazlitt found new inspiration and encouragement from Joseph Fawcett, a retired clergyman and prominent reformer, whose enormous breadth of taste left the young thinker awestruck. From Fawcett, in the words of biographer Ralph Wardle, he imbibed a love for "good fiction and impassioned writing", Fawcett being "a man of keen intelligence who did not scorn the products of the imagination or apologize for his tastes". With him, Hazlitt not only discussed the radical thinkers of their day, but ranged comprehensively over all kinds of literature, from John Milton's Paradise Lost to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. This background is important for understanding the breadth and depth of Hazlitt's own taste in his later critical writings.[31]

Aside from residing with his father as he strove to find his own voice and work out his philosophical ideas, Hazlitt also stayed over with his older brother John, who had studied under Joshua Reynolds and was following a career as a portrait painter. He also spent evenings with delight in London's theatrical world,[32] an aesthetic experience that would prove, somewhat later, of seminal importance to his mature critical work. In large part, however, Hazlitt was then living a decidedly contemplative existence, one somewhat frustrated by his failure to express on paper the thoughts and feelings that were churning within him.[33] It was at this juncture that Hazlitt met Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This encounter, a life-changing event, was subsequently to exercise a profound influence on his writing career that, in retrospect, Hazlitt regarded as greater than any other.[34]

Poetry, painting, and marriage (1798–1812) edit

"First Acquaintance with Poets" edit

On 14 January 1798, Hazlitt, in what was to prove a turning point in his life, encountered Coleridge as the latter preached at the Unitarian chapel in Shrewsbury. A minister at the time, Coleridge had as yet none of the fame that would later accrue to him as a poet, critic, and philosopher. Hazlitt, like Thomas de Quincey and many others afterwards, was swept off his feet by Coleridge's dazzlingly erudite eloquence.[35] "I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres", he wrote years later in his essay "My First Acquaintance with Poets".[36] It was, he added, as if "Poetry and Philosophy had met together. Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of Religion." Long after they had parted ways, Hazlitt would speak of Coleridge as "the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius".[37] That Hazlitt learned to express his thoughts "in motley imagery or quaint allusion", that his understanding "ever found a language to express itself," was, he openly acknowledged, something he owed to Coleridge.[38] For his part, Coleridge showed an interest in the younger man's germinating philosophical ideas, and offered encouragement.

In April, Hazlitt jumped at Coleridge's invitation to visit him at his residence in Nether Stowey, and that same day was taken to call in on William Wordsworth at his house in Alfoxton.[39] Again, Hazlitt was enraptured. While he was not immediately struck by Wordsworth's appearance, in observing the cast of Wordsworth's eyes as they contemplated a sunset, he reflected, "With what eyes these poets see nature!" Given the opportunity to read the Lyrical Ballads in manuscript, Hazlitt saw that Wordsworth had the mind of a true poet, and "the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me."[39]

All three were fired by the ideals of liberty and the rights of man. Rambling across the countryside, they talked of poetry, philosophy, and the political movements that were shaking up the old order. This unity of spirit was not to last: Hazlitt himself would recall disagreeing with Wordsworth on the philosophical underpinnings of his projected poem The Recluse,[40] just as he had earlier been amazed that Coleridge could dismiss David Hume, regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of that century, as a charlatan.[41] Nonetheless, the experience impressed on the young Hazlitt, at 20, the sense that not only philosophy, to which he had devoted himself, but also poetry warranted appreciation for what it could teach, and the three-week visit stimulated him to pursue his own thinking and writing.[42] Coleridge, on his part, using an archery metaphor, later revealed that he had been highly impressed by Hazlitt's promise as a thinker: "He sends well-headed and well-feathered Thoughts straight forwards to the mark with a Twang of the Bow-string."[43]

Itinerant painter edit

Meanwhile, the fact remained that Hazlitt had chosen not to follow a pastoral vocation. Although he never abandoned his goal of writing a philosophical treatise on the disinterestedness of the human mind, it had to be put aside indefinitely. Still dependent on his father, he was now obliged to earn his own living. Artistic talent seemed to run in the family on his mother's side and, starting in 1798, he became increasingly fascinated by painting. His brother, John, had by now become a successful painter of miniature portraits. So it occurred to William that he might earn a living similarly, and he began to take lessons from John.[44]

Hazlitt also visited various picture galleries, and he began to get work doing portraits, painting somewhat in the style of Rembrandt.[45] In this fashion, he managed to make something of a living for a time, travelling back and forth between London and the country, wherever he could get work. By 1802, his work was considered good enough that a portrait he had recently painted of his father was accepted for exhibition by the Royal Academy.[46]

Later in 1802, Hazlitt was commissioned to travel to Paris and copy several works of the Old Masters hanging in The Louvre. This was one of the great opportunities of his life. Over a period of three months, he spent long hours rapturously studying the gallery's collections,[47] and hard thinking and close analysis would later inform a considerable body of his art criticism. He also happened to catch sight of Napoleon, a man he idolised as the rescuer of the common man from the oppression of royal "Legitimacy".[48]

Back in England, Hazlitt again travelled up into the country, having obtained several commissions to paint portraits. One commission again proved fortunate, as it brought him back in touch with Coleridge and Wordsworth, both of whose portraits he painted, as well as one of Coleridge's son Hartley. Hazlitt aimed to create the best pictures he could, whether they flattered their subjects or not, and neither poet was satisfied with his result, though Wordsworth and their mutual friend Robert Southey considered his portrait of Coleridge a better likeness than one by the celebrated James Northcote.[49]

Recourse to prostitutes was unexceptional among literary—and other—men of that period,[50] and if Hazlitt was to differ from his contemporaries, the difference lay in his unabashed candour about such arrangements.[51] Personally, he was rarely comfortable in middle- and upper-class female society, and, tormented by desires he later branded as "a perpetual clog and dead-weight upon the reason,"[52] he made an overture to a local woman while visiting the Lake District with Coleridge. He had however grossly misread her intentions and an altercation broke out which led to his precipitous retreat from the town under cover of darkness. This public blunder placed a further strain on his relations with both Coleridge and Wordsworth, which were already fraying for other reasons.[53]

Marriage, family, and friends edit

On 22 March 1803, at a London dinner party held by William Godwin, Hazlitt met Charles Lamb and his sister Mary.[54] A mutual sympathy sprang up immediately between William and Charles, and they became fast friends. Their friendship, though sometimes strained by Hazlitt's difficult ways, lasted until the end of Hazlitt's life.[55] He was fond of Mary as well, and—ironically in view of her intermittent fits of insanity—he considered her the most reasonable woman he had ever met,[56] no small compliment coming from a man whose view of women at times took a misogynistic turn.[57] Hazlitt frequented the society of the Lambs for the next several years, from 1806 often attending their famous "Wednesdays" and later "Thursdays" literary salons.[58]

 
Portrait of Charles Lamb by William Hazlitt, 1804

With few commissions for painting, Hazlitt seized the opportunity to ready for publication his philosophical treatise, which, according to his son, he had completed by 1803. Godwin intervened to help him find a publisher, and the work, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind, was printed in a limited edition of 250 copies by Joseph Johnson on 19 July 1805.[59] This gained him little notice as an original thinker, and no money. Although the treatise he valued above anything else he wrote was never, at least in his own lifetime, recognised for what he believed was its true worth,[60] it brought him attention as one who had a grasp of contemporary philosophy. He therefore was commissioned to abridge and write a preface to a now obscure work of mental philosophy, The Light of Nature Pursued by Abraham Tucker (originally published in seven volumes from 1765 to 1777), which appeared in 1807[61] and may have had some influence on his own later thinking.[62]

Slowly Hazlitt began to find enough work to eke out a bare living. His outrage at events then taking place in English politics in reaction to Napoleon's wars led to his writing and publishing, at his own expense (though he had almost no money), a political pamphlet, Free Thoughts on Public Affairs (1806),[63] an attempt to mediate between private economic interests and a national application of the thesis of his Essay that human motivation is not, inherently, entirely selfish.[64]

Hazlitt also contributed three letters to William Cobbett's Weekly Political Register at this time, all scathing critiques of Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798 and later editions). Here he replaced the dense, abstruse manner of his philosophical work with the trenchant prose style that was to be the hallmark of his later essays. Hazlitt's philippic, dismissing Malthus's argument on population limits as sycophantic rhetoric to flatter the rich, since large swathes of uncultivated land lay all round England, has been hailed as "the most substantial, comprehensive, and brilliant of the Romantic ripostes to Malthus".[65] Also in 1807 Hazlitt undertook a compilation of parliamentary speeches, published that year as The Eloquence of the British Senate. In the prefaces to the speeches, he began to show a skill he would later develop to perfection, the art of the pithy character sketch. He was able to find more work as a portrait painter as well.[66]

In May 1808, Hazlitt married Sarah Stoddart,[67] a friend of Mary Lamb and sister of John Stoddart, a journalist who became editor of The Times newspaper in 1814. Shortly before the wedding, John Stoddart established a trust into which he began paying £100 per year, for the benefit of Hazlitt and his wife—this was a very generous gesture, but Hazlitt detested being supported by his brother-in-law, whose political beliefs he despised.[68] This union was not a love match, and incompatibilities would later drive the couple apart; yet, for a while, it seemed to work well enough, and their initial behavior was both playful and affectionate. Miss Stoddart, an unconventional woman, accepted Hazlitt and tolerated his eccentricities just as he, with his own somewhat offbeat individualism, accepted her. Together they made an agreeable social foursome with the Lambs, who visited them when they set up a household in Winterslow, a village a few miles from Salisbury, Wiltshire, in southern England.[69] The couple had three sons over the next few years, Only one of their children, William, born in 1811, survived infancy. (He in turn fathered William Carew Hazlitt.)[70]

As the head of a family, Hazlitt was now more than ever in need of money. Through William Godwin, with whom he was frequently in touch, he obtained a commission to write an English grammar, published on 11 November 1809 as A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue.[71] Another project that came his way was the work that was published as Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft, a compilation of autobiographical writing by the recently deceased playwright, novelist, and radical political activist, together with additional material by Hazlitt himself. Though completed in 1810, this work did not see the light of day until 1816, and so provided no financial gain to satisfy the needs of a young husband and father. Hazlitt in the meantime had not forsaken his painterly ambitions. His environs at Winterslow afforded him opportunities for landscape painting, and he spent considerable time in London procuring commissions for portraits.[72]

In January 1812 Hazlitt embarked on a sometime career as a lecturer, in this first instance by delivering a series of talks on the British philosophers at the Russell Institution in London. A central thesis of the talks was that Thomas Hobbes, rather than John Locke, had laid the foundations of modern philosophy. After a shaky beginning, Hazlitt attracted some attention—and some much-needed money—by these lectures, and they provided him with an opportunity to expound some of his own ideas.[73]

The year 1812 seems to have been the last in which Hazlitt persisted seriously in his ambition to make a career as a painter. Although he had demonstrated some talent, the results of his most impassioned efforts always fell far short of the very standards he had set by comparing his own work with the productions of such masters as Rembrandt, Titian, and Raphael. It did not help that, when painting commissioned portraits, he refused to sacrifice his artistic integrity to the temptation to flatter his subjects for remunerative gain. The results, not infrequently, failed to please their subjects, and he consequently failed to build a clientele.[74]

But other opportunities awaited him.

Journalist, essayist, and Liber Amoris (1812–1823) edit

Journalist edit

 
The back of No. 19, York Street (1848). In 1651 John Milton moved into a "pretty garden-house" in Petty France. He lived there until the Restoration. Later it became No. 19 York Street, belonged to Jeremy Bentham, was occupied successively by James Mill and William Hazlitt, and finally demolished in 1877.[75]

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.[76]

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.[77]

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.[78] 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").[79] 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.[80] 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.[81]

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.[82]

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.[83] Profoundly depressed, he took up heavy drinking and was reported to have walked around unshaven and unwashed for weeks.[84] 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.[85]

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.[86]

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).[87]

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.[88]

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),[89] 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.[90] 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".[91]

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".[92] 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".[93] And in "On Good-Nature", "Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues...."[94]

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".[95] 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,[96] all too often he gets the quotes wrong.[97] 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....[98]
(See Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.)

Though Hazlitt was still following the model of the older periodical essayists,[99] these quirks, together with his keen social and psychological insights, began here to coalesce into a style very much his own.[100]

Success—and trouble edit

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).[101]

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".[102] 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.[103]

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".[104]

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.[105] 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.[106] 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.[107]

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.[108] 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.[109] Lectures on "the English Comic Writers" soon followed, and these as well were published in book form.[110] 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.[111]

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.[112] 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.[113] 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.[114]

Solitude and infatuation edit

His lecturing in particular had drawn to Hazlitt a small group of admirers. Best known today is the poet John Keats,[115] who not only attended the lectures but became Hazlitt's friend in this period.[8] The two met in November 1816[116] through their mutual friend, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and were last seen together in May 1820 at a dinner given by Haydon.[117] In those few years before the poet's untimely death, the two read and admired each other's work,[118] and Keats, as a younger man seeking guidance, solicited Hazlitt's advice on a course of reading and direction in his career.[119] Some of Keats's writing, particularly his key idea of "negative capability", was influenced by the concept of "disinterested sympathy" he discovered in Hazlitt,[120] whose work the poet devoured.[121] 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.[122]

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 Robinson[123] and the novelist Mary Russell Mitford.[124] 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.[125]

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.[69] 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."[126] 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.[127]

 
Roman road toward Middle Winterslow, and the route which Hazlitt preferred to take to the village[128]

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.[129] 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.[88] 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".[130]

In these essays, many of which have been acclaimed as among the finest in the language,[131] 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)[132] 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).[133]

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.[134]

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.)[135] 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.[136] 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).[137]

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.[138] 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,[139] 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.[140]

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.[141]

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".[142]

However, such complimentary assessments were the rare exception. Whatever its ultimate merits, Liber Amoris provided ample ammunition for Hazlitt's detractors,[143] 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".[144] As ever, peace of mind proved elusive for William Hazlitt.

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

Philosopher, again edit

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",[145] 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).[148] 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,[149] was controversial in its time as depicting too "low" a subject.[150] 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".[149]

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.[151]

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.[152] 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".[153]

Not only do the "Table-Talk" essays frequently display "trenchant insights into human nature",[154] 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.[155] 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.[156] 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.[157]

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.[158] 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",[159] and critic David Bromwich called many of these essays "more observing, original, and keen-witted than any others in the language".[160]

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.[161] 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.[162]

But they also lacked the benefit of Hazlitt's extended reasoning and lucid imagery, and were never included among his greatest works.[163]

Recovery and second marriage edit

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.[164] 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.[165]

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 edit

 
William Hazlitt in 1825 (engraving derived from a chalk sketch by William Bewick).

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.[166] 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.[167]

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,[168] 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.[169] 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".[170] 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.[171]

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".[172]

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.[173]

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".[174] Much of The Friend was "sophistry".[175] The Statesman's Manual was not to be read "with any patience".[176] A Lay Sermon was enough to "make a fool...of any man".[177] For betraying their earlier liberal principles, both Coleridge and Southey were "sworn brothers in the same cause of righteous apostacy".[178]

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".[179] Even his "apostacy" is somewhat excused by noting that in recent times, when "Genius stopped the way of Legitimacy...it was to be...crushed",[180] regrettably but understandably leading many former liberals to protect themselves by siding with the powers that be.[181]

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".[182] 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".[183]

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.[184] 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".[185] 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".[186]

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.[187]

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...".[188]

European tour edit

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.[189]

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...."[190]

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.[191]

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.[192]

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),[193] 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.[194]

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".[195]

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!"[196]

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".[196]

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"?[197] 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".[197] 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".[198]

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".[199]

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.[200]

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?"[201] Further, "the picture galleries at Rome disappointed me quite".[202] 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,[203] 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....[204]

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".[205] The palaces were incomparable: "I never saw palaces anywhere but at Venice".[206] 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.[207]

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.[208] 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".[209] 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.[210]

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!"[211]

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".[212]

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.[213] But he already had plans to return to Paris.[214]

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

"The old age of artists" edit

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.[215]

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"),[216] 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.[217] 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.[218]

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.[219]

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.[220]

He was perhaps overly self-disparaging in this self-portrait,[221] 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 edit

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".[222] 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".[223]

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.[224]

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.[225] 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.[226]

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.[227] 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.[228] 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.[229]

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[230]—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".[231] 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".[232]

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.[233] 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.[234]

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 edit

 
Plaque in Bouverie Street, London, marking the site of William Hazlitt's house
 
The site of Hazlitt's grave in the churchyard of St Anne's, Soho, with a new memorial commissioned following a campaign led by Tom Paulin

Few details remain of Hazlitt's daily life in his last years.[235] 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.[236] 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.[237] 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."[238]

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.[239] 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.[240] He also began contributing once again to The Edinburgh Review; paying better than the other journals, it helped stave off hunger.[241]

After a brief stay on Bouverie Street in 1829, sharing lodgings with his son,[242] Hazlitt moved into a small apartment at 6 Frith Street, Soho.[243] He continued to turn out articles for The Atlas, The London Weekly Review, and now The Court Journal.[244] 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,[245] 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".[246] At this time he was reading the novels of Edward Bulwer in hopes of reviewing them for The Edinburgh Review.[247]

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.[248] A few visitors cheered these days, but, toward the end, he was frequently too sick[249] to see any of them.[250] 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.[251] 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?[252] 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".[253]

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.[254]

Posthumous reputation edit

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.[255]

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.[256][257] 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.[258]

Bibliography edit

Selected works edit

  • 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 edit

  • 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.
  • The Spirit of Controversy and Other Essays. Edited by Jon Mee and James Grande. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

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).

See also edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ "A master of English prose style, a beautifully modulated general essayist, the first great theatre critic in English, the first great art critic, a magnificent political journalist and polemicist ... Hazlitt is both a philosopher and one of the supreme literary critics in the language." Paulin, "Spirit".
  2. ^ Jacques Barzun praises Lionel Trilling as just behind Hazlitt, implying that Hazlitt, ahead of Coleridge, Bagehot, and Arnold as well, is in the top rank of English-language literary critics. Quoted in Philip French, Three Honest Men: Edmund Wilson, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling (Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet Press, 1980), cited in Rodden, Trilling, p. 3.
  3. ^ "... in the tradition of the English essay, descended from Johnson, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Orwell", Hitchens on Display, by George Packer, in The New Yorker, 3 July 2008
  4. ^ Irving Howe considered Orwell "the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr Johnson". "George Orwell: 'As the bones know' ", by Irving Howe, Harper's Magazine, January 1969.
  5. ^ A. C. Grayling notes that Kenneth Clark "described Hazlitt as the 'best critic of art before Ruskin'." Grayling, p. 380. See also Bromwich, p. 20.
  6. ^ "Most of Hazlitt's work is out of print, or unavailable in paperback. He is not studied in most university English courses ...", Paulin, "Spirit".
  7. ^ "Both Deane and Heaney had studied Hazlitt at school in Derry in the 1950s – he'd been replaced by Orwell when I took the same A-level course in the 60s, and the diminution of his reputation has been fairly steady until recently." Paulin, "Spirit".
  8. ^ a b Grayling, pp. 209–10.
  9. ^ Paulin, Day-Star, p. 313.
  10. ^ Wardle, p. 4.
  11. ^ Wardle, p. 16; Wu, p. 33.
  12. ^ "The taste of barberries, which have hung out in the snow during the severity of a North American winter, I have in my mouth still, after an interval of thirty years". Hazlitt, Works, vol. 8, p. 259. (Hereafter, references to Works will imply "Hazlitt, Works".) "In all his works", remarks Hazlitt's biographer and editor P.P. Howe, "the only reference to his stay in America is to the taste of the barberries picked on the hills". Howe, p. 29.
  13. ^ Bourne, p. 51.
  14. ^ Wardle, p. 40, gives the name as the "New Unitarian College at Hackney" but most other reliable sources, e.g. Albrecht, p. 29, call it the "Unitarian New College at Hackney". This Hackney College was a short-lived institution (1786–1796) with no connection to the current college by that name.
  15. ^ Wardle, p. 45.
  16. ^ Grayling, p. 32.
  17. ^ Baker, pp. 20–25.
  18. ^ Wardle, pp. 43–44.
  19. ^ It may have been the case that he was forced to leave for financial reasons, given that "special grants and terms available for Divinity students could be his no more". (Maclean, p. 81) It is also thought however that the college's policy of encouraging open intellectual inquiry proved self-destructive; even faculty members were resigning, and in fact the college closed its doors forever about a year after Hazlitt's departure. See Wardle, pp. 45–46; also Maclean, pp. 78–81.
  20. ^ Kinnaird, p. 11.
  21. ^ Wardle, pp. 41–45.
  22. ^ Many of these values were also impressed upon him by his father at home, and by reading thinkers who were not Unitarian, but his two years at Hackney College built upon and greatly strengthened them. See Kinnaird, pp. 11–25; Paulin, Day-Star, pp. 8–11.
  23. ^ Works, vol. 7, p. 7. Quoted in Gilmartin, pp. 95–96.
  24. ^ Jones, p. 6.
  25. ^ Wardle, pp. 44–45.
  26. ^ Maclean, p. 78.
  27. ^ Wardle, p. 48.
  28. ^ Published in 1805 as "An Essay on the Principles of Human Action". See Works, vol. 1.
  29. ^ This school of thought, the "modern philosophy", was primarily English, descended from John Locke and, originally (as Hazlitt himself insisted in his lectures on philosophy a few years later), Thomas Hobbes. See Bromwich pp. 36, 45–47; Grayling, p. 148; Park, pp. 46–47.
  30. ^ Wardle, p. 243. See also "A Letter to William Gifford" (1819), in Works, vol. 9, pp. 58–59.
  31. ^ Wardle, pp. 48–49.
  32. ^ See Maclean, pp. 79–80.
  33. ^ Maclean, pp. 96–98.
  34. ^ Works, vol. 17, p. 107. His meeting with Coleridge "was a revelation, and was to change him forever". Wu, p. 67.
  35. ^ Holmes 1999, p. 100. Holmes 1989, pp. 178–79. Barker, p. 211.
  36. ^ Works, vol. 17, p. 108.
  37. ^ "On the Living Poets", concluding his 1818 "Lectures on the English Poets", Works, vol. 5, p. 167.
  38. ^ "My First Acquaintance with Poets", Works, vol. 17, p. 107.
  39. ^ a b Barker, p. 211.
  40. ^ Burley, pp. 109–10.
  41. ^ Wu, p. 6.
  42. ^ See Maclean, pp. 119–121. See also Wardle, pp. 50–60.
  43. ^ Quoted from Coleridge's correspondence with Thomas Wedgwood, in Grayling, p. 86.
  44. ^ Wardle, pp. 60–61.
  45. ^ Wardle, p. 61.
  46. ^ Wardle, p. 67.
  47. ^ Eighteen years later, Hazlitt reviewed nostalgically the "pleasure in painting, which none but painters know", and all the delight he found in this art, in his essay "On the Pleasure of Painting". Hazlitt, Works, vol. 8, pp. 5–21.
  48. ^ Wardle, pp. 68–75.
  49. ^ Wardle, pp. 76–77.
  50. ^ Wu, pp. 59–60.
  51. ^ Hazlitt's honesty about sex in general was unusual in that increasingly prudish age, as shown in his later confessional book Liber Amoris, which scandalised his contemporaries. See Grayling, p. 297.
  52. ^ Wu, p. 60.
  53. ^ Wardle, pp. 78–80. For another account of this contretemps, see Maclean, pp. 198–201.
  54. ^ Grayling, p. 80; Wu, p. 86.
  55. ^ Reminiscing in 1866, Bryan Waller Procter, who knew them both, thought meeting Hazlitt had been a "great acquisition" for Lamb; the same could justly be said for Hazlitt as well, as Catherine Macdonald Maclean noted. From that time onward, she writes, the two "had for each other...the easy unstrained affection of brothers". Maclean, pp. 206–207.
  56. ^ Wardle, p. 82.
  57. ^ E.g., "Women have as little imagination as they have reason. They are pure egotists", "Characteristics", Hazlitt, Works, vol. 9, p. 213.
  58. ^ Grayling, p. 102.
  59. ^ Burley, p. 114; Wu, p. 104.
  60. ^ Throughout his life, Hazlitt held this to be his most original work. Its thesis is that, contrary to the prevailing belief of the moral philosophy of the time, benevolent actions are not modifications of an underlying fundamental human selfishness. The fundamental tendency of the human mind is, in a particular sense, disinterest. That is, an interest in the future welfare of others is no less natural to us than such an interest in our own future welfare. See Bromwich, pp. 46–57; Grayling pp. 362–65.
  61. ^ Wardle, pp. 82–87.
  62. ^ See Bromwich, p. 45 and elsewhere.
  63. ^ The title echoed that of a pamphlet by John Wesley,Free Thoughts on Public Affairs in a Letter to a Friend, (1770). See Burley, p. 191, note 23.
  64. ^ Burley, p. 191, note 25. On the argument of the Essay, see Grayling, pp. 363–65.
  65. ^ Mayhew, pp. 90–91.
  66. ^ Wardle, pp. 100–102.
  67. ^ Writing the Self: The journal of Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, 1774–1843. Gillian Beattie-Smith, Women's History Review 22(2), April 2013. DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2012.726110. Beattie-Smith gives the date of the marriage as 12 May, Sarah Hazlitt's death year as 1843 (she was born in 1774). According to Duncan Wu, they were married on 1 May 1808 and Sarah Hazlitt died in 1840. See Wu, pp. 123, 438.
  68. ^ Wu 2008, pp. 118, 160, 221.
  69. ^ a b Wu, Duncan (2 April 2009). "William Hazlitt: The lion in Winterslow". The Independent. Retrieved 6 March 2021.
  70. ^ Maclean covers the marriage at length, pp. 233–75; for a briefer account, see Wardle, pp. 103–21.
  71. ^ Grayling, pp. 130–31; Gilmartin, pp. 8–9.
  72. ^ Wardle, pp. 104–123.
  73. ^ Wardle, pp. 126–130.
  74. ^ Wardle, pp. 130–131.
  75. ^ Stephen 1894, p. 32.
  76. ^ Wardle, pp. 132, 144, 145.
  77. ^ Wardle, pp. 133, 134.
  78. ^ Wardle, p. 146.
  79. ^ Bromwich, p. 158.
  80. ^ Wordsworth might as well, wrote Hazlitt, have "given to his work the form of a didactic poem altogether." Works, vol. 4, p. 113. According to David Bromwich, Hazlitt thought that "in The Excursion the two great impulses of romance, to tell a story and to give instruction, have thus separated out completely." Bromwich, p. 166.
  81. ^ Wardle, pp. 146, 171, 183.
  82. ^ Wardle, p. 152. By 1825, Hazlitt, having become well known as a journalist, was lampooned (very briefly) as the character Will Hazelpipes in John Paterson's Mare, James Hogg's allegorical satire on the Edinburgh publishing scene first published in the Newcastle Magazine. Hunter, Adrian (ed.) (2020), James Hogg: Contributions to English, Irish and American Periodicals, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 19–34, 213. ISBN 9780748695980
  83. ^ It was "the death of the cause of human freedom in his time", as Wardle put it, p. 157.
  84. ^ Wardle, p. 157.
  85. ^ Wardle, p. 162.
  86. ^ Wardle, pp. 171–74.
  87. ^ Maclean, pp. 393–95; Wardle, pp. 162–64. See also Hazlitt, Works, vol. 12, pp. 77–89.
  88. ^ a b Law, p. 8.
  89. ^ Maclean, p. 300.
  90. ^ Hazlitt's extreme way of making a point seemed to develop naturally. Yet it was to an extent a consciously applied device. See Gerald Lahey, "Introduction", Hazlitt, Letters, p. 11, and Hazlitt's own letter to Macvey Napier on 2 April 1816: "I confess I am apt to be paradoxical in stating an extreme opinion when I think the prevailing one not quite correct", p. 158.
  91. ^ Works, vol. 4, p. 1.
  92. ^ Works, vol. 4, p. 80.
  93. ^ Works, vol. 4, p. 95.
  94. ^ Works, vol. 4, p. 100.
  95. ^ Works, vol. 4, p. 122.
  96. ^ Law, p. 42. See also Paul Hamilton, "Hazlitt and the 'Kings of Speech'", in Natarajan, Paulin, and Wu, pp. 69, 76: "Hazlitt's most powerful critical effect is to get his readers to think through quotations, and so benefit from his opening of cultural reservoirs to irrigate the understanding of the common reader."; "His own essays integrate marvellously inventive and pointed patchworks of quotations ... we are obliged perpetually to witness, through frequent citation, ... the legitimacy and advantage of appropriating the language of others to promote our most intimate, private sense of self. ... Hazlitt is never repetitious in his ventriloquizing; he never turns quotations into tags, is never sententious."; and Bromwich, pp. 275–87.
  97. ^ Albrecht, p. 184: "Hazlitt's quotations are notoriously inaccurate."
  98. ^ Misquoted this way elsewhere as well; the original has "splendour in the grass ... glory in the flower". Works, vol. 4, p. 119.
  99. ^ Notable for a certain whimsy, for frequent "characters" (sketches of typical character types), for use of fictitious or real interpolated letters, and for an informal tone—though not to the degree of the "familiar essay". Law, p.8.
  100. ^ "Regardless of subject matter, the style was consistently arresting". Wardle, p. 184.
  101. ^ Wardle, pp. 181–97.
  102. ^ All of Shakespeare's plays, that is, if one excludes those few plays not then believed to be primarily by Shakespeare or by him at all. Wardle, p. 204.
  103. ^ Wardle, pp.197–202.
  104. ^ Wardle, p. 203.
  105. ^ Wardle, p. 240.
  106. ^ "By the end of 1817 Hazlitt's reputation had received almost irreparable injury." Maclean, p. 361.
  107. ^ Wardle, pp. 211–22; Jones, p. 281.
  108. ^ Wardle, p. 224.
  109. ^ Wardle, p. 244.
  110. ^ Wardle, pp. 236–40.
  111. ^ Wardle, pp. 249–56.
  112. ^ Wardle, pp. 229–34.
  113. ^ Wardle, pp. 243–44.
  114. ^ Wardle, pp. 231, 255, 257.
  115. ^ Bate, p. 259; Wardle, p. 278.
  116. ^ Wu, pp. 196–97.
  117. ^ Howe, p. 297.
  118. ^ Works, vol. 12, p. 225.
  119. ^ Bate, p. 609; Wardle, pp. 221, 252.
  120. ^ Bate, pp. 259–62; Wu, p. 197; Corrigan, p. 148.
  121. ^ Bate, pp. 216, 240, 262, 461.
  122. ^ Wu, pp. 197, 287, 356. The relationship between Hazlitt and Keats is explored in depth in Bromwich, pp. 362–401. See also Natarajan, pp. 107–119; Ley, p. 61, note 13.
  123. ^ Jones, p. 281; Robinson, however, sharply disapproved of Hazlitt's moral character.
  124. ^ Jones, pp. 314–15.
  125. ^ Jones, p. 305.
  126. ^ Words written in Winterslow Hut on 18 and 19 January 1821, as Hazlitt informs the reader in a footnote to the essay soon published as "On Living to One's-Self", Works, vol. 8, p. 91.
  127. ^ Jones, pp. 303–18.
  128. ^ Wu 2008, p. 120.
  129. ^ Wardle, pp. 262–63; Bromwich, pp. 345–47.
  130. ^ Works, vol. 8, p. 33.
  131. ^ Bromwich, p. 347; Grayling, pp. 258, 360.
  132. ^ Works, vol. 8, pp. 5–21.
  133. ^ Works, vol. 8, p. 185. See also Jones, pp.307–8.
  134. ^ Though Hazlitt's relationship with Sarah Walker was an aspect of his life even his admirers through the Victorian era preferred to overlook, it has received ample attention since then. See Maclean, pp. 415–502; Wardle, pp. 268–365; Jones, pp. 308–48.
  135. ^ As Grayling writes, Hazlitt "gave into his feelings at their first impulse, and invariably suffered the consequences. In the case of Sarah Walker, 'suffered' is a wholly inadequate word. His obsession with her drove him almost mad." Grayling, p. 261.
  136. ^ As Maurice Whelan has noted, "What has been generally ignored is that exactly one month before he first set eyes on Sarah Walker, Hazlitt's father died. This event has been afforded little significance in his life." Whelan, p. 89.
  137. ^ Wardle, p. 304.
  138. ^ Grayling, p. 290.
  139. ^ Jones, p. 332.
  140. ^ Jones, pp. 336–37; it is not known why they never married.
  141. ^ Wardle, pp. 363–65. Wardle was writing in 1971; twenty-first-century critics continue to be sharply divided. David Armitage has assessed the book disparagingly as "the result of a tormented mind grasping literary motifs in a desperate and increasingly unsuccessful (and self indulgent) attempt to communicate its descent into incoherence...", while Gregory Dart has acclaimed it "the most powerful account of unrequited love in English literature". To James Ley, "It is ... an unsparing account of the psychology of obsession, the way a mind in the grip of an all-consuming passion can distort reality to its own detriment". Armitage, p. 223; Dart 2012, p. 85; Ley p. 38.
  142. ^ Quoted by Jones, p. 338.
  143. ^ Ley, p. 38: "The book quickly became notorious, thanks largely to Hazlitt's political enemies, who seized upon the work as evidence of his depraved nature".
  144. ^ Quoted in Wardle, p. 363.
  145. ^ "Hazlitt seemed to have achieved a detached, yet humane, posture as he regarded the world about him. He spoke as a philosopher in retirement rather than a bitter recluse". Wardle, p. 274.
  146. ^ For a comparison of Hazlitt's and Immanuel Kant's ideas about genius, see Milnes, pp. 133ff.
  147. ^ See Wardle, p. 282.
  148. ^ The New Monthly Magazine, vol. 3 (January–June, 1822), pp. 102–12, at Google Books.
  149. ^ a b Robinson 1999, p.168.
  150. ^ Cyrus Redding, assistant editor of the New Monthly Magazine was scandalized: "It was a thoroughly blackguard subject...disgracing our literature in the eye of other nations", he later wrote. Quoted by Wardle, p. 302.
  151. ^ Works, vol. 12, p. 130. Quoted by Gregory Dart; see Dart 1999, p. 233.
  152. ^ Dart 1999, p. 233.
  153. ^ Works, vol. 12, p. 136. See also Maclean (pp. 500–2), who considers this "the most powerful" of Hazlitt's essays of the period.
  154. ^ Wardle, p. 272, speaking in particular of "On the Conversation of Authors" (1820).
  155. ^ A body of interconnected philosophic beliefs underlies most of Hazlitt's writing, including his familiar essays. See Schneider, "William Hazlitt", p. 94.
  156. ^ Most critics, according to Elisabeth Schneider, summing up the critical literature on Hazlitt as of 1966, have felt that these "quotations endow what he is saying with a richness of association that justifies their presence; they were, moreover, his natural way of thinking and not usually a deliberate adornment". Schneider, "William Hazlitt", p. 112.
  157. ^ Works, vol. 9, pp. 242–48.
  158. ^ It has been noted, however, that, only a few years after publication, they may have furnished a model for Pushkin's historical anecdotes. Lednicki, p. 5. Twenty-first century critic Tim Killick has also noted that even around the end of Hazlitt's life, the intimate style and succinct narration found in these essays set a tone markedly new, displacing the lingering vogue of stilted Johnsonian periods, influencing not only nonfiction but also the genre of short fiction. Killick, pp. 20–21.
  159. ^ Jones, p. 318.
  160. ^ Bromwich, p. 347.
  161. ^ Wardle (citing Stewart C. Wilcox, in the Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 9 [1948], pp. 418–23), p. 366.
  162. ^ Works, vol. 9, p. 228.
  163. ^ As George Sampson, a later editor of Hazlitt's essays, expressed it, this book "cannot be called entirely successful. Hazlitt's best aphorisms are to be found scattered in profusion up and down his longer essays; his deliberate attempts at epigram are more like excised paragraphs than the stamped and coined utterance of genuine aphorism." See the "Introduction" to Sampson, p. xxxii.
  164. ^ Jones, pp. 341–43. Wardle, pp. 377–378.
  165. ^ Wardle, p. 381. For a full account of what is known about Hazlitt's marriage to Isabella Bridgwater, see Jones, pp. 348–64. Stanley Jones first discovered Isabella Hazlitt's background and maiden name only in the late twentieth century.
  166. ^ As he explains in "On Application to Study", written around this time, his ideas "cost me a great deal twenty years ago". But now he is able to copy out the results of prior study and thought "mechanically". "I do not say they came there mechanically—I transcribe them to paper mechanically".Works, vol. 12, p. 62.
  167. ^ Works, vol. 11, p. 6.
  168. ^ Works, vol. 1, pp. 177–364.
  169. ^ Gilmartin, pp. 3–8.
  170. ^ Works, vol. 11, p. 105.
  171. ^ Works, vol. 11, p. 111.
  172. ^ Works, vol. 11, p. 114.
  173. ^ Works, vol. 11, pp. 93–94, 339.
  174. ^ Works, vol. 5, p. 167.
  175. ^ Works, vol. 7, p. 106.
  176. ^ Works, vol. 7, p. 126.
  177. ^ Works, vol. 7, p. 129.
  178. ^ Works, vol. 19, p. 197.
  179. ^ Works, vol. 11, p. 30.
  180. ^ Works, vol. 11, p. 37.
  181. ^ "By 1825, Hazlitt was able to regard [Coleridge's abandonment of his earlier views regarding his own poetry] with a greater air of detachment" than in the earlier reviews. Park, p. 234.
  182. ^ Works, vol. 11, p. 79.
  183. ^ Works, vol. 11, pp. 84–85.
  184. ^ "The subjects of some [of these essays], like Thomas Campbell, seem hardly to deserve the praise which Hazlitt accords them", wrote Ralph Wardle (p. 406), in 1971.
  185. ^ Wardle, p. 406.
  186. ^ Works, vol. 11, p. 28.
  187. ^ Park, pp. 213–15.
  188. ^ a b Quoted in Wardle, p. 407.
  189. ^ See Wardle, pp. 391–425, for an extensive account of this tour, and Jones, pp. 364–72, for numerous additional details.
  190. ^ Works, vol. 10, p. 105.
  191. ^ Wardle, pp. 394–96.
  192. ^ Wardle, pp. 396–99; Jones, pp. 367–68.
  193. ^ Wardle, p. 414.
  194. ^ Works, vol. 10, p. 227.
  195. ^ Wardle, p. 396.
  196. ^ a b Works, vol. 10, p. 289.
  197. ^ a b Works, vol. 10, p. 114.
  198. ^ Works, vol. 10, p. 118.
  199. ^ Works, vol. 10, p. 101.
  200. ^ Wardle, p. 411.
  201. ^ Works, vol. 10, p. 232.
  202. ^ Works, vol. 10, p. 237.
  203. ^ Works, vol. 17, p. 139.
  204. ^ These were his reminiscences two years later in the article "English Students at Rome", Works, vol. 17, p. 142.
  205. ^ Works, vol. 10, pp. 266–67.
  206. ^ Works, vol. 10, p. 268.
  207. ^ Works, vol. 10, pp. 269–74; Wardle, p. 416.
  208. ^ Jones, pp. 369. For an account of Hazlitt's attitude toward Rousseau from a perspective very different from Hazlitt's own, see Duffy, pp. 70–81.
  209. ^ Works, vol. 10, p. 285.
  210. ^ Works, vol. 10, p. 287.
  211. ^ Works, vol. 20, p. 393; Wardle, p. 422; Jones, p. 372.
  212. ^ Works, vol. 17, pp. 161–62; quoted in Wardle, p. 419.
  213. ^ Wardle, pp. 423–25.
  214. ^ Jones, p. 372.
  215. ^ Wardle, pp. 431–32.
  216. ^ Works, vol. 12, pp. 88–97.
  217. ^ Wardle, p. 434.
  218. ^ As Hazlitt explained in an introductory note: "I differ from my great and original predecessor ... James Boswell ... in ... that whereas he is supposed to have invented nothing, I have feigned whatever I pleased". Works, vol. 11, p. 350. On the other hand, as Catherine Macdonald Maclean reminds us, "there is much in the 'Conversations' which could only have come from Northcote, like the 'divine chit-chat' about Johnson and Burke and Goldsmith and Sir Joshua Reynolds, in which Hazlitt delighted". Maclean, p. 551.
  219. ^ Not the least of those who took personal offence was William Godwin. See Jones, p. 377. Also outraged was the family of Zachariah Mudge, which resulted in the omission of several passages when the conversations were published in book form. See Wardle, pp. 481–82.
  220. ^ Works, vol. 11, pp. 318–19.
  221. ^ See his editor's note to the last conversation, Works, vol. 11, p. 376.
  222. ^ In the words of biographer Ralph Wardle, p. 446.
  223. ^ Wardle, p. 446.
  224. ^ Wardle, p. 438.
  225. ^ Works, vol. 17, pp. 189–99. See also Wardle, p. 438.
  226. ^ That this journey was undertaken is not certain, but Jones believes that it probably took place and lay behind the exacerbation of tensions between Hazlitt and his wife. Jones, p. 375.
  227. ^ Jones, p. 378.
  228. ^ Wardle, p. 441.
  229. ^ See Maclean, p. 552, Jones, pp. 373–75.
  230. ^ Maclean writes of "the blighting effect of the melancholy which had by this time had become habitual with Hazlitt", p. 538.
  231. ^ Written probably at Vevey in 1825. Works, vol. 12, pp. 365–82, 427.
  232. ^ Quoted in Maclean, p. 555.
  233. ^ This was established at length by Robert E. Robinson in 1959; cited in Wardle, pp. 448–49.
  234. ^ Works, vol. 14, p. 236. Quoted in Wardle, p. 450.
  235. ^ "Nothing more clearly shows our essential ignorance of Hazlitt's life in his last years than the silence which closes around his second marriage after his wife's defection. ... A comparable reticence marks the whole of the succeeding period". Jones, p. 376.
  236. ^ Wardle, pp. 465–66.
  237. ^ Wardle, p. 481.
  238. ^ Works, vol. 17, p. 366.
  239. ^ Works, vol. 20, pp. 296–321.
  240. ^ Works, vol. 20, pp. 369–76.
  241. ^ Maclean, p. 552.
  242. ^ Jones, p. xvi.
  243. ^ Maclean, p. 553.
  244. ^ Wardle, p. 479, 481.
  245. ^ Wardle, p. 483.
  246. ^ "The Sick Chamber", first published in The New Monthly Magazine, August 1830, Works, vol. 17, pp. 375–76.
  247. ^ According to P.G. Patmore, reported by P. P. Howe in Hazlitt's Works, vol. 17, p. 429.
  248. ^ As A. C. Grayling wrote in a memorial in The Guardian at the turn of the twenty-first century: "From his bed he wrote that the revolution 'was like a resurrection from the dead, and showed plainly that liberty too has a spirit of life in it; and the hatred of oppression is "the unquenchable flame, the worm that dies not"'". See Grayling, "Memorial".
  249. ^ Grayling conjectures that his ailment was either stomach cancer or ulcers. Grayling, "Memorial".
  250. ^ Wardle, p. 484.
  251. ^ Hazlitt mentions this explicitly in "The Sick Chamber", Works, vol. 17, p. 373.
  252. ^ See Maclean, pp. 577–79; Wardle, p. 485; and Jones, pp. 380–81.
  253. ^ Not all of his biographers were convinced that he really uttered those words. See Maclean, p. 608; Wardle, p. 485; and Jones, p. 381.
  254. ^ Wardle, p. 486.
  255. ^ Grayling, "Memorial"; Paulin, Day-Star, p. 1; Paulin, "Spirit"; Burley, p. 3.
  256. ^ Mayes, Ian, "Revival time", The Guardian, 5 May 2001, via Hazlitt Society.
  257. ^ Ezard, John, "William Hazlitt's near-derelict grave restored", The Guardian, 11 April 2003.
  258. ^ Smith, Jules (2005). "Jonathan Bate". British Literature Council. Retrieved 27 November 2015.

References edit

  • Albrecht, W. P. Hazlitt and the Creative Imagination. Lawrence: The University of Kansas Press, 1965.
  • Armitage, David. "Monstrosity and Myth in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein". In Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004, pp. 200–26.
  • Baker, Herschel. William Hazlitt. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962.
  • Barker, Juliet. Wordsworth: A Life. London: Viking/Penguin Books, 2000.
  • Bate, Walter Jackson. John Keats. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963.
  • Bourne, Derrick, and Tonkin, Morley, eds. Through Nine Reigns: 200 Years of the Shrewsbury Chronicle 1772–1972. Shropshire: Powysland Newspapers, 1972.
  • Bromwich, David. Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983 (second edition, 1999).
  • Burley, Stephen. Hazlitt the Dissenter: Religion, Philosophy, and Politics, 1766–1816. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
  • Corrigan, Timothy. "Keats, Hazlitt, and Public Character". In The Challenge of Keats: Bicentenary Essays 1795–1995. Edited by Allan C. Christensen, Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones, Giuseppe Galigani, and Anthony L. Johnson. Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 2000, pp. 146–59.
  • Dart, Gregory. Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1819–1840: Cockney Adventures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  • Dart, Gregory. Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
  • Duffy, Edward. Rousseau in England: The Context of Shelley's Critique of the Enlightenment. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1979.
  • Gilmartin, Kevin. William Hazlitt: Political Essayist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
  • Grayling, A.C. The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.
  • Hazlitt, William. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Edited by P.P. Howe. 21 vols. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1930–1934.
  • Hazlitt, William. The Letters of William Hazlitt. Edited by Herschel Moreland Sikes, with Willard Hallam Bonner and Gerald Lahey. New York: New York University Press, 1978.
  • Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Darker Reflections. London: Flamingo Books, 1999.
  • Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Early Visions. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989.
  • Howe, P. P. The Life of William Hazlitt. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1922, 1947 (reissued in paperback by Penguin Books, 1949; citations are to this edition).
  • Jones, Stanley. Hazlitt: A Life from Winterslow to Frith Street. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
  • Killick, Tim. British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Rise of the Tale. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013.
  • Kinnaird, John. William Hazlitt: Critic of Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.
  • Law, Marie Hamilton. The English Familiar Essay in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Elements Old and New Which Went into Its Making as Exemplified in the Writings of Hunt, Hazlitt and Lamb. New York: Russell & Russell, Inc, 1934 (reissued 1965).
  • Lednicki, Waclaw. Bits of Table Talk on Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Goethe, Turgenev and Sienkiewicz. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956..
  • Ley, James. The Critic in the Modern World: Public Criticism from Samuel Johnson to James Wood. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2014.
  • Maclean, Catherine Macdonald. Born Under Saturn: A Biography of William Hazlitt. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944.
  • Mayhew, Robert J. Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014.
  • Milnes, Tim. Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  • Natarajan, Uttara. Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals, and the Metaphysics of Power. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
  • Natarajan, Uttara; Paulin, Tom; and Wu, Duncan, eds. Metaphysical Hazlitt: Bicentenary Essays. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.
  • Park, Roy. Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
  • Paulin, Tom. The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.
  • Robinson, Jeffrey Cane. The Current of Romantic Passion. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.
  • Rodden, John. "Introduction". Lionel Trilling and the Critics: Opposing Selves. Edited by John Rodden. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
  • Sampson, George, ed. Hazlitt: Selected Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958.
  • Stephen, Leslie (1894). "Milton, John (1608–1674)" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 38. London: Smith, Elder & Co. p. 32.
  • Schneider, Elisabeth W. "William Hazlitt". In The English Romantic Poets & Essayists: A Review of Research and Criticism (revised edition). Edited by Carolyn Washburn Houtchens and Lawrence Huston Houtchens. New York: New York University Press, and London: University of London Press Limited, 1957, 1966, pp. 75–113.
  • Wardle, Ralph M. Hazlitt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
  • Whelan, Maurice. In the Company of William Hazlitt: Thoughts for the Twenty-first Century. London: Merlin Press, 2005.
  • Wu, Duncan. William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Further reading edit

  • Bate, Jonathan. The Cure for Love. New York: Picador, 1998.
  • Haverty, Anne. The Far Side of a Kiss. New York: Chatto & Windus, 2000.
  • The Hazlitt Review (ISSN 1757-8299)

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william, hazlitt, this, article, about, english, literary, critic, essayist, other, people, with, same, name, disambiguation, april, 1778, september, 1830, english, essayist, drama, literary, critic, painter, social, commentator, philosopher, considered, great. This article is about the English literary critic and essayist For other people with the same name see William Hazlitt disambiguation William Hazlitt 10 April 1778 18 September 1830 was an English essayist drama and literary critic painter social commentator and philosopher He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language 1 2 placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell 3 4 He is also acknowledged as the finest art critic of his age 5 Despite his high standing among historians of literature and art his work is currently little read and mostly out of print 6 7 William HazlittSelf portrait from about 1802Born 1778 04 10 10 April 1778Maidstone Kent EnglandDied18 September 1830 1830 09 18 aged 52 Soho London EnglandOccupationEssayist literary critic painter philosopherEducationNew College at HackneyNotable worksCharacters of Shakespear s Plays Table Talk The Spirit of the AgeSpouseSarah Stoddart m 1808 div 1822 wbr Isabella Bridgewater m 1824 wbr ChildrenWilliam HazlittParentsWilliam Hazlitt father RelativesJohn Hazlitt brother William Carew Hazlitt grandson During his lifetime he befriended many people who are now part of the 19th century literary canon including Charles and Mary Lamb Stendhal Samuel Taylor Coleridge William Wordsworth and John Keats 8 Contents 1 Life and works 1 1 Background 1 2 Childhood education young philosopher 1778 1797 1 2 1 Childhood 1 2 2 Education 1 2 3 Young philosopher 1 3 Poetry painting and marriage 1798 1812 1 3 1 First Acquaintance with Poets 1 3 2 Itinerant painter 1 3 3 Marriage family and friends 1 4 Journalist essayist and Liber Amoris 1812 1823 1 4 1 Journalist 1 4 2 Success and trouble 1 4 3 Solitude and infatuation 1 5 Return to philosophy second marriage and tour of Europe 1823 1825 1 5 1 Philosopher again 1 5 2 Recovery and second marriage 1 5 3 The Spirit of the Age 1 5 4 European tour 1 6 Return to London trip to Paris and last years 1825 1830 1 6 1 The old age of artists 1 6 2 Hero worship 1 6 3 Last years 2 Posthumous reputation 3 Bibliography 3 1 Selected works 3 2 Selected posthumous collections 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External linksLife and works editBackground edit The family of Hazlitt s father were Irish Protestants who moved from the county of Antrim to Tipperary in the early 18th century Also named William Hazlitt Hazlitt s father attended the University of Glasgow where he was taught by Adam Smith 9 receiving a master s degree in 1760 Not entirely satisfied with his Presbyterian faith he became a Unitarian minister in England In 1764 he became pastor at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire where in 1766 he married Grace Loftus daughter of a recently deceased ironmonger Of their many children only three survived infancy The first of these John later known as a portrait painter was born in 1767 at Marshfield in Gloucestershire where the Reverend William Hazlitt had accepted a new pastorate after his marriage In 1770 the elder Hazlitt accepted yet another position and moved with his family to Maidstone Kent where his first and only surviving daughter Margaret usually known as Peggy was born that same year 10 Childhood education young philosopher 1778 1797 edit Childhood edit nbsp House in Wem Shropshire where the Reverend William Hazlitt and his family lived between 1787 and 1813William the youngest of the surviving Hazlitt children was born in Mitre Lane Maidstone in 1778 In 1780 when he was two his family began a nomadic lifestyle that was to last several years From Maidstone his father took them to Bandon County Cork Ireland and from Bandon in 1783 to the United States where the elder Hazlitt preached lectured and sought a ministerial call to a liberal congregation His efforts to obtain a post did not meet with success although he did exert a certain influence on the founding of the first Unitarian church in Boston 11 In 1786 87 the family returned to England and settled in Wem in Shropshire Hazlitt would remember little of his years in America save the taste of barberries 12 Education edit Hazlitt was educated at home and at a local school At age 13 he had the satisfaction of seeing his writing appear in print for the first time when the Shrewsbury Chronicle published his letter July 1791 condemning the riots in Birmingham over Joseph Priestley s support for the French Revolution 13 In 1793 his father sent him to a Unitarian seminary on what was then the outskirts of London the New College at Hackney commonly referred to as Hackney College 14 The schooling he received there though relatively brief approximately two years made a deep and abiding impression on Hazlitt 15 The curriculum at Hackney was very broad including a grounding in the Greek and Latin classics mathematics history government science and of course religion 16 Much of his education there was along traditional lines however the tutelage having been strongly influenced by eminent Dissenting thinkers of the day like Richard Price and Joseph Priestley 17 there was also much that was nonconformist Priestley whom Hazlitt had read and who was also one of his teachers was an impassioned commentator on political issues of the day This along with the turmoil in the wake of the French Revolution sparked in Hazlitt and his classmates lively debates on these issues as they saw their world being transformed around them 18 Changes were taking place within the young Hazlitt as well While out of respect for his father Hazlitt never openly broke with his religion he suffered a loss of faith and left Hackney before completing his preparation for the ministry 19 Although Hazlitt rejected the Unitarian theology 20 his time at Hackney left him with much more than religious scepticism He had read widely and formed habits of independent thought and respect for the truth that would remain with him for life 21 He had thoroughly absorbed a belief in liberty and the rights of man and confidence in the idea that the mind was an active force which by disseminating knowledge in both the sciences and the arts could reinforce the natural tendency in humanity towards good The school had impressed upon him the importance of the individual s ability working both alone and within a mutually supportive community to effect beneficial change by adhering to strongly held principles The belief of many Unitarian thinkers in the natural disinterestedness of the human mind had also laid a foundation for the young Hazlitt s own philosophical explorations along those lines And though harsh experience and disillusionment later compelled him to qualify some of his early ideas about human nature he was left with a hatred of tyranny and persecution that he retained to his dying days 22 as expressed a quarter century afterward in the retrospective summing up of his political stance in his 1819 collection of Political Essays I have a hatred of tyranny and a contempt for its tools I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power and I have tried to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended 23 Young philosopher edit Returning home around 1795 his thoughts were directed into more secular channels encompassing not only politics but increasingly modern philosophy which he had begun to read with fascination at Hackney In September 1794 he had met William Godwin 24 the reformist thinker whose recently published Political Justice had taken English intellectual circles by storm Hazlitt was never to feel entirely in sympathy with Godwin s philosophy but it gave him much food for thought 25 He spent much of his time at home in an intensive study of English Scottish and Irish thinkers like John Locke David Hartley George Berkeley and David Hume together with French thinkers like Claude Adrien Helvetius Etienne Bonnot de Condillac the Marquis de Condorcet and Baron d Holbach 26 From this point onwards Hazlitt s goal was to become a philosopher His intense studies focused on man as a social and political animal and in particular on the philosophy of mind a discipline that would later be called psychology It was in this period also that he came across Jean Jacques Rousseau who became one of the most important influences on the budding philosopher s thinking He also familiarized himself with the works of Edmund Burke whose writing style impressed him enormously 27 Hazlitt then set about working out a treatise in painstaking detail on the natural disinterestedness of the human mind 28 It was Hazlitt s intention to disprove the notion that man is naturally selfish benevolent actions being rationally modified selfishness ideally made habitual a premise fundamental to much of the moral philosophy of Hazlitt s day 29 The treatise was finally published only in 1805 In the meantime the scope of his reading had broadened and new circumstances had altered the course of his career Yet to the end of his life he would consider himself a philosopher 30 Around 1796 Hazlitt found new inspiration and encouragement from Joseph Fawcett a retired clergyman and prominent reformer whose enormous breadth of taste left the young thinker awestruck From Fawcett in the words of biographer Ralph Wardle he imbibed a love for good fiction and impassioned writing Fawcett being a man of keen intelligence who did not scorn the products of the imagination or apologize for his tastes With him Hazlitt not only discussed the radical thinkers of their day but ranged comprehensively over all kinds of literature from John Milton s Paradise Lost to Laurence Sterne s Tristram Shandy This background is important for understanding the breadth and depth of Hazlitt s own taste in his later critical writings 31 Aside from residing with his father as he strove to find his own voice and work out his philosophical ideas Hazlitt also stayed over with his older brother John who had studied under Joshua Reynolds and was following a career as a portrait painter He also spent evenings with delight in London s theatrical world 32 an aesthetic experience that would prove somewhat later of seminal importance to his mature critical work In large part however Hazlitt was then living a decidedly contemplative existence one somewhat frustrated by his failure to express on paper the thoughts and feelings that were churning within him 33 It was at this juncture that Hazlitt met Samuel Taylor Coleridge This encounter a life changing event was subsequently to exercise a profound influence on his writing career that in retrospect Hazlitt regarded as greater than any other 34 Poetry painting and marriage 1798 1812 edit First Acquaintance with Poets edit On 14 January 1798 Hazlitt in what was to prove a turning point in his life encountered Coleridge as the latter preached at the Unitarian chapel in Shrewsbury A minister at the time Coleridge had as yet none of the fame that would later accrue to him as a poet critic and philosopher Hazlitt like Thomas de Quincey and many others afterwards was swept off his feet by Coleridge s dazzlingly erudite eloquence 35 I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres he wrote years later in his essay My First Acquaintance with Poets 36 It was he added as if Poetry and Philosophy had met together Truth and Genius had embraced under the eye and with the sanction of Religion Long after they had parted ways Hazlitt would speak of Coleridge as the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius 37 That Hazlitt learned to express his thoughts in motley imagery or quaint allusion that his understanding ever found a language to express itself was he openly acknowledged something he owed to Coleridge 38 For his part Coleridge showed an interest in the younger man s germinating philosophical ideas and offered encouragement In April Hazlitt jumped at Coleridge s invitation to visit him at his residence in Nether Stowey and that same day was taken to call in on William Wordsworth at his house in Alfoxton 39 Again Hazlitt was enraptured While he was not immediately struck by Wordsworth s appearance in observing the cast of Wordsworth s eyes as they contemplated a sunset he reflected With what eyes these poets see nature Given the opportunity to read the Lyrical Ballads in manuscript Hazlitt saw that Wordsworth had the mind of a true poet and the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me 39 All three were fired by the ideals of liberty and the rights of man Rambling across the countryside they talked of poetry philosophy and the political movements that were shaking up the old order This unity of spirit was not to last Hazlitt himself would recall disagreeing with Wordsworth on the philosophical underpinnings of his projected poem The Recluse 40 just as he had earlier been amazed that Coleridge could dismiss David Hume regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of that century as a charlatan 41 Nonetheless the experience impressed on the young Hazlitt at 20 the sense that not only philosophy to which he had devoted himself but also poetry warranted appreciation for what it could teach and the three week visit stimulated him to pursue his own thinking and writing 42 Coleridge on his part using an archery metaphor later revealed that he had been highly impressed by Hazlitt s promise as a thinker He sends well headed and well feathered Thoughts straight forwards to the mark with a Twang of the Bow string 43 Itinerant painter edit Meanwhile the fact remained that Hazlitt had chosen not to follow a pastoral vocation Although he never abandoned his goal of writing a philosophical treatise on the disinterestedness of the human mind it had to be put aside indefinitely Still dependent on his father he was now obliged to earn his own living Artistic talent seemed to run in the family on his mother s side and starting in 1798 he became increasingly fascinated by painting His brother John had by now become a successful painter of miniature portraits So it occurred to William that he might earn a living similarly and he began to take lessons from John 44 Hazlitt also visited various picture galleries and he began to get work doing portraits painting somewhat in the style of Rembrandt 45 In this fashion he managed to make something of a living for a time travelling back and forth between London and the country wherever he could get work By 1802 his work was considered good enough that a portrait he had recently painted of his father was accepted for exhibition by the Royal Academy 46 Later in 1802 Hazlitt was commissioned to travel to Paris and copy several works of the Old Masters hanging in The Louvre This was one of the great opportunities of his life Over a period of three months he spent long hours rapturously studying the gallery s collections 47 and hard thinking and close analysis would later inform a considerable body of his art criticism He also happened to catch sight of Napoleon a man he idolised as the rescuer of the common man from the oppression of royal Legitimacy 48 Back in England Hazlitt again travelled up into the country having obtained several commissions to paint portraits One commission again proved fortunate as it brought him back in touch with Coleridge and Wordsworth both of whose portraits he painted as well as one of Coleridge s son Hartley Hazlitt aimed to create the best pictures he could whether they flattered their subjects or not and neither poet was satisfied with his result though Wordsworth and their mutual friend Robert Southey considered his portrait of Coleridge a better likeness than one by the celebrated James Northcote 49 Recourse to prostitutes was unexceptional among literary and other men of that period 50 and if Hazlitt was to differ from his contemporaries the difference lay in his unabashed candour about such arrangements 51 Personally he was rarely comfortable in middle and upper class female society and tormented by desires he later branded as a perpetual clog and dead weight upon the reason 52 he made an overture to a local woman while visiting the Lake District with Coleridge He had however grossly misread her intentions and an altercation broke out which led to his precipitous retreat from the town under cover of darkness This public blunder placed a further strain on his relations with both Coleridge and Wordsworth which were already fraying for other reasons 53 Marriage family and friends edit On 22 March 1803 at a London dinner party held by William Godwin Hazlitt met Charles Lamb and his sister Mary 54 A mutual sympathy sprang up immediately between William and Charles and they became fast friends Their friendship though sometimes strained by Hazlitt s difficult ways lasted until the end of Hazlitt s life 55 He was fond of Mary as well and ironically in view of her intermittent fits of insanity he considered her the most reasonable woman he had ever met 56 no small compliment coming from a man whose view of women at times took a misogynistic turn 57 Hazlitt frequented the society of the Lambs for the next several years from 1806 often attending their famous Wednesdays and later Thursdays literary salons 58 nbsp Portrait of Charles Lamb by William Hazlitt 1804With few commissions for painting Hazlitt seized the opportunity to ready for publication his philosophical treatise which according to his son he had completed by 1803 Godwin intervened to help him find a publisher and the work An Essay on the Principles of Human Action Being an Argument in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind was printed in a limited edition of 250 copies by Joseph Johnson on 19 July 1805 59 This gained him little notice as an original thinker and no money Although the treatise he valued above anything else he wrote was never at least in his own lifetime recognised for what he believed was its true worth 60 it brought him attention as one who had a grasp of contemporary philosophy He therefore was commissioned to abridge and write a preface to a now obscure work of mental philosophy The Light of Nature Pursued by Abraham Tucker originally published in seven volumes from 1765 to 1777 which appeared in 1807 61 and may have had some influence on his own later thinking 62 Slowly Hazlitt began to find enough work to eke out a bare living His outrage at events then taking place in English politics in reaction to Napoleon s wars led to his writing and publishing at his own expense though he had almost no money a political pamphlet Free Thoughts on Public Affairs 1806 63 an attempt to mediate between private economic interests and a national application of the thesis of his Essay that human motivation is not inherently entirely selfish 64 Hazlitt also contributed three letters to William Cobbett s Weekly Political Register at this time all scathing critiques of Thomas Malthus s Essay on the Principle of Population 1798 and later editions Here he replaced the dense abstruse manner of his philosophical work with the trenchant prose style that was to be the hallmark of his later essays Hazlitt s philippic dismissing Malthus s argument on population limits as sycophantic rhetoric to flatter the rich since large swathes of uncultivated land lay all round England has been hailed as the most substantial comprehensive and brilliant of the Romantic ripostes to Malthus 65 Also in 1807 Hazlitt undertook a compilation of parliamentary speeches published that year as The Eloquence of the British Senate In the prefaces to the speeches he began to show a skill he would later develop to perfection the art of the pithy character sketch He was able to find more work as a portrait painter as well 66 In May 1808 Hazlitt married Sarah Stoddart 67 a friend of Mary Lamb and sister of John Stoddart a journalist who became editor of The Times newspaper in 1814 Shortly before the wedding John Stoddart established a trust into which he began paying 100 per year for the benefit of Hazlitt and his wife this was a very generous gesture but Hazlitt detested being supported by his brother in law whose political beliefs he despised 68 This union was not a love match and incompatibilities would later drive the couple apart yet for a while it seemed to work well enough and their initial behavior was both playful and affectionate Miss Stoddart an unconventional woman accepted Hazlitt and tolerated his eccentricities just as he with his own somewhat offbeat individualism accepted her Together they made an agreeable social foursome with the Lambs who visited them when they set up a household in Winterslow a village a few miles from Salisbury Wiltshire in southern England 69 The couple had three sons over the next few years Only one of their children William born in 1811 survived infancy He in turn fathered William Carew Hazlitt 70 As the head of a family Hazlitt was now more than ever in need of money Through William Godwin with whom he was frequently in touch he obtained a commission to write an English grammar published on 11 November 1809 as A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue 71 Another project that came his way was the work that was published as Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft a compilation of autobiographical writing by the recently deceased playwright novelist and radical political activist together with additional material by Hazlitt himself Though completed in 1810 this work did not see the light of day until 1816 and so provided no financial gain to satisfy the needs of a young husband and father Hazlitt in the meantime had not forsaken his painterly ambitions His environs at Winterslow afforded him opportunities for landscape painting and he spent considerable time in London procuring commissions for portraits 72 In January 1812 Hazlitt embarked on a sometime career as a lecturer in this first instance by delivering a series of talks on the British philosophers at the Russell Institution in London A central thesis of the talks was that Thomas Hobbes rather than John Locke had laid the foundations of modern philosophy After a shaky beginning Hazlitt attracted some attention and some much needed money by these lectures and they provided him with an opportunity to expound some of his own ideas 73 The year 1812 seems to have been the last in which Hazlitt persisted seriously in his ambition to make a career as a painter Although he had demonstrated some talent the results of his most impassioned efforts always fell far short of the very standards he had set by comparing his own work with the productions of such masters as Rembrandt Titian and Raphael It did not help that when painting commissioned portraits he refused to sacrifice his artistic integrity to the temptation to flatter his subjects for remunerative gain The results not infrequently failed to please their subjects and he consequently failed to build a clientele 74 But other opportunities awaited him Journalist essayist and Liber Amoris 1812 1823 edit Journalist edit nbsp The back of No 19 York Street 1848 In 1651 John Milton moved into a pretty garden house in Petty France He lived there until the Restoration Later it became No 19 York Street belonged to Jeremy Bentham was occupied successively by James Mill and William Hazlitt and finally demolished in 1877 75 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 76 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 77 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 78 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 79 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 80 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 81 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 82 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 83 Profoundly depressed he took up heavy drinking and was reported to have walked around unshaven and unwashed for weeks 84 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 85 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 86 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 87 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 88 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 89 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 90 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 91 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 92 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 93 And in On Good Nature Good nature or what is often considered as such is the most selfish of all the virtues 94 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 95 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 96 all too often he gets the quotes wrong 97 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 98 See Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood Though Hazlitt was still following the model of the older periodical essayists 99 these quirks together with his keen social and psychological insights began here to coalesce into a style very much his own 100 Success and trouble edit 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 101 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 102 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 103 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 104 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 105 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 106 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 107 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 108 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 109 Lectures on the English Comic Writers soon followed and these as well were published in book form 110 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 111 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 112 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 113 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 114 Solitude and infatuation edit His lecturing in particular had drawn to Hazlitt a small group of admirers Best known today is the poet John Keats 115 who not only attended the lectures but became Hazlitt s friend in this period 8 The two met in November 1816 116 through their mutual friend the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon and were last seen together in May 1820 at a dinner given by Haydon 117 In those few years before the poet s untimely death the two read and admired each other s work 118 and Keats as a younger man seeking guidance solicited Hazlitt s advice on a course of reading and direction in his career 119 Some of Keats s writing particularly his key idea of negative capability was influenced by the concept of disinterested sympathy he discovered in Hazlitt 120 whose work the poet devoured 121 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 122 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 Robinson 123 and the novelist Mary Russell Mitford 124 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 125 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 69 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 126 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 127 nbsp Roman road toward Middle Winterslow and the route which Hazlitt preferred to take to the village 128 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 129 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 88 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 130 In these essays many of which have been acclaimed as among the finest in the language 131 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 132 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 133 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 134 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 135 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 136 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 137 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 138 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 139 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 140 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 141 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 142 However such complimentary assessments were the rare exception Whatever its ultimate merits Liber Amoris provided ample ammunition for Hazlitt s detractors 143 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 144 As ever peace of mind proved elusive for William Hazlitt Return to philosophy second marriage and tour of Europe 1823 1825 edit Philosopher again edit 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 145 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 148 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 149 was controversial in its time as depicting too low a subject 150 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 149 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 151 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 152 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 153 Not only do the Table Talk essays frequently display trenchant insights into human nature 154 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 155 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 156 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 157 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 158 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 159 and critic David Bromwich called many of these essays more observing original and keen witted than any others in the language 160 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 161 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 162 But they also lacked the benefit of Hazlitt s extended reasoning and lucid imagery and were never included among his greatest works 163 Recovery and second marriage edit 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 164 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 nee 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 165 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 edit Main article The Spirit of the Age nbsp William Hazlitt in 1825 engraving derived from a chalk sketch by William Bewick 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 166 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 167 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 168 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 169 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 170 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 171 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 172 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 173 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 174 Much of The Friend was sophistry 175 The Statesman s Manual was not to be read with any patience 176 A Lay Sermon was enough to make a fool of any man 177 For betraying their earlier liberal principles both Coleridge and Southey were sworn brothers in the same cause of righteous apostacy 178 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 179 Even his apostacy is somewhat excused by noting that in recent times when Genius stopped the way of Legitimacy it was to be crushed 180 regrettably but understandably leading many former liberals to protect themselves by siding with the powers that be 181 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 182 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 183 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 184 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 185 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 186 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 187 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 188 European tour edit 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 189 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 190 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 191 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 192 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 193 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 194 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 195 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 196 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 196 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 197 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 197 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 198 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 199 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 200 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 201 Further the picture galleries at Rome disappointed me quite 202 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 203 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 204 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 205 The palaces were incomparable I never saw palaces anywhere but at Venice 206 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 207 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 Heloise a love story that he associated with his disappointed love for Sarah Walker 208 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 209 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 210 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 211 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 212 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 213 But he already had plans to return to Paris 214 Return to London trip to Paris and last years 1825 1830 edit The old age of artists edit 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 215 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 216 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 217 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 218 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 219 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 220 He was perhaps overly self disparaging in this self portrait 221 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 edit 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 222 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 223 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 224 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 225 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 226 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 227 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 228 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 229 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 230 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 231 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 232 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 233 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 234 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 edit nbsp Plaque in Bouverie Street London marking the site of William Hazlitt s house nbsp The site of Hazlitt s grave in the churchyard of St Anne s Soho with a new memorial commissioned following a campaign led by Tom PaulinFew details remain of Hazlitt s daily life in his last years 235 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 fiancee 236 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 237 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 238 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 239 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 240 He also began contributing once again to The Edinburgh Review paying better than the other journals it helped stave off hunger 241 After a brief stay on Bouverie Street in 1829 sharing lodgings with his son 242 Hazlitt moved into a small apartment at 6 Frith Street Soho 243 He continued to turn out articles for The Atlas The London Weekly Review and now The Court Journal 244 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 245 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 246 At this time he was reading the novels of Edward Bulwer in hopes of reviewing them for The Edinburgh Review 247 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 248 A few visitors cheered these days but toward the end he was frequently too sick 249 to see any of them 250 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 251 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 252 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 253 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 254 Posthumous reputation editHis 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 255 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 256 257 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 258 Bibliography editSelected works edit 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 nbsp 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 nbsp 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 nbsp 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 nbsp 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 edit 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 The Spirit of Controversy and Other Essays Edited by Jon Mee and James Grande Oxford Oxford University Press 2021 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 See also editNapoleonist SyndromeNotes edit A master of English prose style a beautifully modulated general essayist the first great theatre critic in English the first great art critic a magnificent political journalist and polemicist Hazlitt is both a philosopher and one of the supreme literary critics in the language Paulin Spirit Jacques Barzun praises Lionel Trilling as just behind Hazlitt implying that Hazlitt ahead of Coleridge Bagehot and Arnold as well is in the top rank of English language literary critics Quoted in Philip French Three Honest Men Edmund Wilson F R Leavis Lionel Trilling Manchester U K Carcanet Press 1980 cited in Rodden Trilling p 3 in the tradition of the English essay descended from Johnson Lamb Hazlitt and Orwell Hitchens on Display by George Packer in The New Yorker 3 July 2008 Irving Howe considered Orwell the best English essayist since Hazlitt perhaps since Dr Johnson George Orwell As the bones know by Irving Howe Harper s Magazine January 1969 A C Grayling notes that Kenneth Clark described Hazlitt as the best critic of art before Ruskin Grayling p 380 See also Bromwich p 20 Most of Hazlitt s work is out of print or unavailable in paperback He is not studied in most university English courses Paulin Spirit Both Deane and Heaney had studied Hazlitt at school in Derry in the 1950s he d been replaced by Orwell when I took the same A level course in the 60s and the diminution of his reputation has been fairly steady until recently Paulin Spirit a b Grayling pp 209 10 Paulin Day Star p 313 Wardle p 4 Wardle p 16 Wu p 33 The taste of barberries which have hung out in the snow during the severity of a North American winter I have in my mouth still after an interval of thirty years Hazlitt Works vol 8 p 259 Hereafter references to Works will imply Hazlitt Works In all his works remarks Hazlitt s biographer and editor P P Howe the only reference to his stay in America is to the taste of the barberries picked on the hills Howe p 29 Bourne p 51 Wardle p 40 gives the name as the New Unitarian College at Hackney but most other reliable sources e g Albrecht p 29 call it the Unitarian New College at Hackney This Hackney College was a short lived institution 1786 1796 with no connection to the current college by that name Wardle p 45 Grayling p 32 Baker pp 20 25 Wardle pp 43 44 It may have been the case that he was forced to leave for financial reasons given that special grants and terms available for Divinity students could be his no more Maclean p 81 It is also thought however that the college s policy of encouraging open intellectual inquiry proved self destructive even faculty members were resigning and in fact the college closed its doors forever about a year after Hazlitt s departure See Wardle pp 45 46 also Maclean pp 78 81 Kinnaird p 11 Wardle pp 41 45 Many of these values were also impressed upon him by his father at home and by reading thinkers who were not Unitarian but his two years at Hackney College built upon and greatly strengthened them See Kinnaird pp 11 25 Paulin Day Star pp 8 11 Works vol 7 p 7 Quoted in Gilmartin pp 95 96 Jones p 6 Wardle pp 44 45 Maclean p 78 Wardle p 48 Published in 1805 as An Essay on the Principles of Human Action See Works vol 1 This school of thought the modern philosophy was primarily English descended from John Locke and originally as Hazlitt himself insisted in his lectures on philosophy a few years later Thomas Hobbes See Bromwich pp 36 45 47 Grayling p 148 Park pp 46 47 Wardle p 243 See also A Letter to William Gifford 1819 in Works vol 9 pp 58 59 Wardle pp 48 49 See Maclean pp 79 80 Maclean pp 96 98 Works vol 17 p 107 His meeting with Coleridge was a revelation and was to change him forever Wu p 67 Holmes 1999 p 100 Holmes 1989 pp 178 79 Barker p 211 Works vol 17 p 108 On the Living Poets concluding his 1818 Lectures on the English Poets Works vol 5 p 167 My First Acquaintance with Poets Works vol 17 p 107 a b Barker p 211 Burley pp 109 10 Wu p 6 See Maclean pp 119 121 See also Wardle pp 50 60 Quoted from Coleridge s correspondence with Thomas Wedgwood in Grayling p 86 Wardle pp 60 61 Wardle p 61 Wardle p 67 Eighteen years later Hazlitt reviewed nostalgically the pleasure in painting which none but painters know and all the delight he found in this art in his essay On the Pleasure of Painting Hazlitt Works vol 8 pp 5 21 Wardle pp 68 75 Wardle pp 76 77 Wu pp 59 60 Hazlitt s honesty about sex in general was unusual in that increasingly prudish age as shown in his later confessional book Liber Amoris which scandalised his contemporaries See Grayling p 297 Wu p 60 Wardle pp 78 80 For another account of this contretemps see Maclean pp 198 201 Grayling p 80 Wu p 86 Reminiscing in 1866 Bryan Waller Procter who knew them both thought meeting Hazlitt had been a great acquisition for Lamb the same could justly be said for Hazlitt as well as Catherine Macdonald Maclean noted From that time onward she writes the two had for each other the easy unstrained affection of brothers Maclean pp 206 207 Wardle p 82 E g Women have as little imagination as they have reason They are pure egotists Characteristics Hazlitt Works vol 9 p 213 Grayling p 102 Burley p 114 Wu p 104 Throughout his life Hazlitt held this to be his most original work Its thesis is that contrary to the prevailing belief of the moral philosophy of the time benevolent actions are not modifications of an underlying fundamental human selfishness The fundamental tendency of the human mind is in a particular sense disinterest That is an interest in the future welfare of others is no less natural to us than such an interest in our own future welfare See Bromwich pp 46 57 Grayling pp 362 65 Wardle pp 82 87 See Bromwich p 45 and elsewhere The title echoed that of a pamphlet by John Wesley Free Thoughts on Public Affairs in a Letter to a Friend 1770 See Burley p 191 note 23 Burley p 191 note 25 On the argument of the Essay see Grayling pp 363 65 Mayhew pp 90 91 Wardle pp 100 102 Writing the Self The journal of Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt 1774 1843 Gillian Beattie Smith Women s History Review 22 2 April 2013 DOI 10 1080 09612025 2012 726110 Beattie Smith gives the date of the marriage as 12 May Sarah Hazlitt s death year as 1843 she was born in 1774 According to Duncan Wu they were married on 1 May 1808 and Sarah Hazlitt died in 1840 See Wu pp 123 438 Wu 2008 pp 118 160 221 a b Wu Duncan 2 April 2009 William Hazlitt The lion in Winterslow The Independent Retrieved 6 March 2021 Maclean covers the marriage at length pp 233 75 for a briefer account see Wardle pp 103 21 Grayling pp 130 31 Gilmartin pp 8 9 Wardle pp 104 123 Wardle pp 126 130 Wardle pp 130 131 Stephen 1894 p 32 Wardle pp 132 144 145 Wardle pp 133 134 Wardle p 146 Bromwich p 158 Wordsworth might as well wrote Hazlitt have given to his work the form of a didactic poem altogether Works vol 4 p 113 According to David Bromwich Hazlitt thought that in The Excursion the two great impulses of romance to tell a story and to give instruction have thus separated out completely Bromwich p 166 Wardle pp 146 171 183 Wardle p 152 By 1825 Hazlitt having become well known as a journalist was lampooned very briefly as the character Will Hazelpipes in John Paterson s Mare James Hogg s allegorical satire on the Edinburgh publishing scene first published in the Newcastle Magazine Hunter Adrian ed 2020 James Hogg Contributions to English Irish and American Periodicals Edinburgh University Press pp 19 34 213 ISBN 9780748695980 It was the death of the cause of human freedom in his time as Wardle put it p 157 Wardle p 157 Wardle p 162 Wardle pp 171 74 Maclean pp 393 95 Wardle pp 162 64 See also Hazlitt Works vol 12 pp 77 89 a b Law p 8 Maclean p 300 Hazlitt s extreme way of making a point seemed to develop naturally Yet it was to an extent a consciously applied device See Gerald Lahey Introduction Hazlitt Letters p 11 and Hazlitt s own letter to Macvey Napier on 2 April 1816 I confess I am apt to be paradoxical in stating an extreme opinion when I think the prevailing one not quite correct p 158 Works vol 4 p 1 Works vol 4 p 80 Works vol 4 p 95 Works vol 4 p 100 Works vol 4 p 122 Law p 42 See also Paul Hamilton Hazlitt and the Kings of Speech in Natarajan Paulin and Wu pp 69 76 Hazlitt s most powerful critical effect is to get his readers to think through quotations and so benefit from his opening of cultural reservoirs to irrigate the understanding of the common reader His own essays integrate marvellously inventive and pointed patchworks of quotations we are obliged perpetually to witness through frequent citation the legitimacy and advantage of appropriating the language of others to promote our most intimate private sense of self Hazlitt is never repetitious in his ventriloquizing he never turns quotations into tags is never sententious and Bromwich pp 275 87 Albrecht p 184 Hazlitt s quotations are notoriously inaccurate Misquoted this way elsewhere as well the original has splendour in the grass glory in the flower Works vol 4 p 119 Notable for a certain whimsy for frequent characters sketches of typical character types for use of fictitious or real interpolated letters and for an informal tone though not to the degree of the familiar essay Law p 8 Regardless of subject matter the style was consistently arresting Wardle p 184 Wardle pp 181 97 All of Shakespeare s plays that is if one excludes those few plays not then believed to be primarily by Shakespeare or by him at all Wardle p 204 Wardle pp 197 202 Wardle p 203 Wardle p 240 By the end of 1817 Hazlitt s reputation had received almost irreparable injury Maclean p 361 Wardle pp 211 22 Jones p 281 Wardle p 224 Wardle p 244 Wardle pp 236 40 Wardle pp 249 56 Wardle pp 229 34 Wardle pp 243 44 Wardle pp 231 255 257 Bate p 259 Wardle p 278 Wu pp 196 97 Howe p 297 Works vol 12 p 225 Bate p 609 Wardle pp 221 252 Bate pp 259 62 Wu p 197 Corrigan p 148 Bate pp 216 240 262 461 Wu pp 197 287 356 The relationship between Hazlitt and Keats is explored in depth in Bromwich pp 362 401 See also Natarajan pp 107 119 Ley p 61 note 13 Jones p 281 Robinson however sharply disapproved of Hazlitt s moral character Jones pp 314 15 Jones p 305 Words written in Winterslow Hut on 18 and 19 January 1821 as Hazlitt informs the reader in a footnote to the essay soon published as On Living to One s Self Works vol 8 p 91 Jones pp 303 18 Wu 2008 p 120 Wardle pp 262 63 Bromwich pp 345 47 Works vol 8 p 33 Bromwich p 347 Grayling pp 258 360 Works vol 8 pp 5 21 Works vol 8 p 185 See also Jones pp 307 8 Though Hazlitt s relationship with Sarah Walker was an aspect of his life even his admirers through the Victorian era preferred to overlook it has received ample attention since then See Maclean pp 415 502 Wardle pp 268 365 Jones pp 308 48 As Grayling writes Hazlitt gave into his feelings at their first impulse and invariably suffered the consequences In the case of Sarah Walker suffered is a wholly inadequate word His obsession with her drove him almost mad Grayling p 261 As Maurice Whelan has noted What has been generally ignored is that exactly one month before he first set eyes on Sarah Walker Hazlitt s father died This event has been afforded little significance in his life Whelan p 89 Wardle p 304 Grayling p 290 Jones p 332 Jones pp 336 37 it is not known why they never married Wardle pp 363 65 Wardle was writing in 1971 twenty first century critics continue to be sharply divided David Armitage has assessed the book disparagingly as the result of a tormented mind grasping literary motifs in a desperate and increasingly unsuccessful and self indulgent attempt to communicate its descent into incoherence while Gregory Dart has acclaimed it the most powerful account of unrequited love in English literature To James Ley It is an unsparing account of the psychology of obsession the way a mind in the grip of an all consuming passion can distort reality to its own detriment Armitage p 223 Dart 2012 p 85 Ley p 38 Quoted by Jones p 338 Ley p 38 The book quickly became notorious thanks largely to Hazlitt s political enemies who seized upon the work as evidence of his depraved nature Quoted in Wardle p 363 Hazlitt seemed to have achieved a detached yet humane posture as he regarded the world about him He spoke as a philosopher in retirement rather than a bitter recluse Wardle p 274 For a comparison of Hazlitt s and Immanuel Kant s ideas about genius see Milnes pp 133ff See Wardle p 282 The New Monthly Magazine vol 3 January June 1822 pp 102 12 at Google Books a b Robinson 1999 p 168 Cyrus Redding assistant editor of the New Monthly Magazine was scandalized It was a thoroughly blackguard subject disgracing our literature in the eye of other nations he later wrote Quoted by Wardle p 302 Works vol 12 p 130 Quoted by Gregory Dart see Dart 1999 p 233 Dart 1999 p 233 Works vol 12 p 136 See also Maclean pp 500 2 who considers this the most powerful of Hazlitt s essays of the period Wardle p 272 speaking in particular of On the Conversation of Authors 1820 A body of interconnected philosophic beliefs underlies most of Hazlitt s writing including his familiar essays See Schneider William Hazlitt p 94 Most critics according to Elisabeth Schneider summing up the critical literature on Hazlitt as of 1966 have felt that these quotations endow what he is saying with a richness of association that justifies their presence they were moreover his natural way of thinking and not usually a deliberate adornment Schneider William Hazlitt p 112 Works vol 9 pp 242 48 It has been noted however that only a few years after publication they may have furnished a model for Pushkin s historical anecdotes Lednicki p 5 Twenty first century critic Tim Killick has also noted that even around the end of Hazlitt s life the intimate style and succinct narration found in these essays set a tone markedly new displacing the lingering vogue of stilted Johnsonian periods influencing not only nonfiction but also the genre of short fiction Killick pp 20 21 Jones p 318 Bromwich p 347 Wardle citing Stewart C Wilcox in the Modern Language Quarterly vol 9 1948 pp 418 23 p 366 Works vol 9 p 228 As George Sampson a later editor of Hazlitt s essays expressed it this book cannot be called entirely successful Hazlitt s best aphorisms are to be found scattered in profusion up and down his longer essays his deliberate attempts at epigram are more like excised paragraphs than the stamped and coined utterance of genuine aphorism See the Introduction to Sampson p xxxii Jones pp 341 43 Wardle pp 377 378 Wardle p 381 For a full account of what is known about Hazlitt s marriage to Isabella Bridgwater see Jones pp 348 64 Stanley Jones first discovered Isabella Hazlitt s background and maiden name only in the late twentieth century As he explains in On Application to Study written around this time his ideas cost me a great deal twenty years ago But now he is able to copy out the results of prior study and thought mechanically I do not say they came there mechanically I transcribe them to paper mechanically Works vol 12 p 62 Works vol 11 p 6 Works vol 1 pp 177 364 Gilmartin pp 3 8 Works vol 11 p 105 Works vol 11 p 111 Works vol 11 p 114 Works vol 11 pp 93 94 339 Works vol 5 p 167 Works vol 7 p 106 Works vol 7 p 126 Works vol 7 p 129 Works vol 19 p 197 Works vol 11 p 30 Works vol 11 p 37 By 1825 Hazlitt was able to regard Coleridge s abandonment of his earlier views regarding his own poetry with a greater air of detachment than in the earlier reviews Park p 234 Works vol 11 p 79 Works vol 11 pp 84 85 The subjects of some of these essays like Thomas Campbell seem hardly to deserve the praise which Hazlitt accords them wrote Ralph Wardle p 406 in 1971 Wardle p 406 Works vol 11 p 28 Park pp 213 15 a b Quoted in Wardle p 407 See Wardle pp 391 425 for an extensive account of this tour and Jones pp 364 72 for numerous additional details Works vol 10 p 105 Wardle pp 394 96 Wardle pp 396 99 Jones pp 367 68 Wardle p 414 Works vol 10 p 227 Wardle p 396 a b Works vol 10 p 289 a b Works vol 10 p 114 Works vol 10 p 118 Works vol 10 p 101 Wardle p 411 Works vol 10 p 232 Works vol 10 p 237 Works vol 17 p 139 These were his reminiscences two years later in the article English Students at Rome Works vol 17 p 142 Works vol 10 pp 266 67 Works vol 10 p 268 Works vol 10 pp 269 74 Wardle p 416 Jones pp 369 For an account of Hazlitt s attitude toward Rousseau from a perspective very different from Hazlitt s own see Duffy pp 70 81 Works vol 10 p 285 Works vol 10 p 287 Works vol 20 p 393 Wardle p 422 Jones p 372 Works vol 17 pp 161 62 quoted in Wardle p 419 Wardle pp 423 25 Jones p 372 Wardle pp 431 32 Works vol 12 pp 88 97 Wardle p 434 As Hazlitt explained in an introductory note I differ from my great and original predecessor James Boswell in that whereas he is supposed to have invented nothing I have feigned whatever I pleased Works vol 11 p 350 On the other hand as Catherine Macdonald Maclean reminds us there is much in the Conversations which could only have come from Northcote like the divine chit chat about Johnson and Burke and Goldsmith and Sir Joshua Reynolds in which Hazlitt delighted Maclean p 551 Not the least of those who took personal offence was William Godwin See Jones p 377 Also outraged was the family of Zachariah Mudge which resulted in the omission of several passages when the conversations were published in book form See Wardle pp 481 82 Works vol 11 pp 318 19 See his editor s note to the last conversation Works vol 11 p 376 In the words of biographer Ralph Wardle p 446 Wardle p 446 Wardle p 438 Works vol 17 pp 189 99 See also Wardle p 438 That this journey was undertaken is not certain but Jones believes that it probably took place and lay behind the exacerbation of tensions between Hazlitt and his wife Jones p 375 Jones p 378 Wardle p 441 See Maclean p 552 Jones pp 373 75 Maclean writes of the blighting effect of the melancholy which had by this time had become habitual with Hazlitt p 538 Written probably at Vevey in 1825 Works vol 12 pp 365 82 427 Quoted in Maclean p 555 This was established at length by Robert E Robinson in 1959 cited in Wardle pp 448 49 Works vol 14 p 236 Quoted in Wardle p 450 Nothing more clearly shows our essential ignorance of Hazlitt s life in his last years than the silence which closes around his second marriage after his wife s defection A comparable reticence marks the whole of the succeeding period Jones p 376 Wardle pp 465 66 Wardle p 481 Works vol 17 p 366 Works vol 20 pp 296 321 Works vol 20 pp 369 76 Maclean p 552 Jones p xvi Maclean p 553 Wardle p 479 481 Wardle p 483 The Sick Chamber first published in The New Monthly Magazine August 1830 Works vol 17 pp 375 76 According to P G Patmore reported by P P Howe in Hazlitt s Works vol 17 p 429 As A C Grayling wrote in a memorial in The Guardian at the turn of the twenty first century From his bed he wrote that the revolution was like a resurrection from the dead and showed plainly that liberty too has a spirit of life in it and the hatred of oppression is the unquenchable flame the worm that dies not See Grayling Memorial Grayling conjectures that his ailment was either stomach cancer or ulcers Grayling Memorial Wardle p 484 Hazlitt mentions this explicitly in The Sick Chamber Works vol 17 p 373 See Maclean pp 577 79 Wardle p 485 and Jones pp 380 81 Not all of his biographers were convinced that he really uttered those words See Maclean p 608 Wardle p 485 and Jones p 381 Wardle p 486 Grayling Memorial Paulin Day Star p 1 Paulin Spirit Burley p 3 Mayes Ian Revival time The Guardian 5 May 2001 via Hazlitt Society Ezard John William Hazlitt s near derelict grave restored The Guardian 11 April 2003 Smith Jules 2005 Jonathan Bate British Literature Council Retrieved 27 November 2015 References editAlbrecht W P Hazlitt and the Creative Imagination Lawrence The University of Kansas Press 1965 Armitage David Monstrosity and Myth in Mary Shelley s Frankenstein In Monstrous Bodies Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe Edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B Landes Ithaca and London Cornell University Press 2004 pp 200 26 Baker Herschel William Hazlitt Cambridge Massachusetts The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1962 Barker Juliet Wordsworth A Life London Viking Penguin Books 2000 Bate Walter Jackson John Keats Cambridge Massachusetts Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1963 Bourne Derrick and Tonkin Morley eds Through Nine Reigns 200 Years of the Shrewsbury Chronicle 1772 1972 Shropshire Powysland Newspapers 1972 Bromwich David Hazlitt The Mind of a Critic New Haven and London Yale University Press 1983 second edition 1999 Burley Stephen Hazlitt the Dissenter Religion Philosophy and Politics 1766 1816 London Palgrave Macmillan 2014 Corrigan Timothy Keats Hazlitt and Public Character In The Challenge of Keats Bicentenary Essays 1795 1995 Edited by Allan C Christensen Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones Giuseppe Galigani and Anthony L Johnson Amsterdam and Atlanta Georgia Rodopi 2000 pp 146 59 Dart Gregory Metropolitan Art and Literature 1819 1840 Cockney Adventures Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2012 Dart Gregory Rousseau Robespierre and English Romanticism Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1999 Duffy Edward Rousseau in England The Context of Shelley s Critique of the Enlightenment Berkeley and Los Angeles California University of California Press 1979 Gilmartin Kevin William Hazlitt Political Essayist Oxford Oxford University Press 2015 Grayling A C The Quarrel of the Age The Life and Times of William Hazlitt London Weidenfeld amp Nicolson 2000 Hazlitt William The Complete Works of William Hazlitt Edited by P P Howe 21 vols London J M Dent amp Sons 1930 1934 Hazlitt William The Letters of William Hazlitt Edited by Herschel Moreland Sikes with Willard Hallam Bonner and Gerald Lahey New York New York University Press 1978 Holmes Richard Coleridge Darker Reflections London Flamingo Books 1999 Holmes Richard Coleridge Early Visions London Hodder amp Stoughton 1989 Howe P P The Life of William Hazlitt London Hamish Hamilton 1922 1947 reissued in paperback by Penguin Books 1949 citations are to this edition Jones Stanley Hazlitt A Life from Winterslow to Frith Street Oxford and New York Oxford University Press 1989 Killick Tim British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century The Rise of the Tale Aldershot Hampshire Ashgate Publishing Limited 2013 Kinnaird John William Hazlitt Critic of Power New York Columbia University Press 1978 Law Marie Hamilton The English Familiar Essay in the Early Nineteenth Century The Elements Old and New Which Went into Its Making as Exemplified in the Writings of Hunt Hazlitt and Lamb New York Russell amp Russell Inc 1934 reissued 1965 Lednicki Waclaw Bits of Table Talk on Pushkin Mickiewicz Goethe Turgenev and Sienkiewicz The Hague Martinus Nijhoff 1956 Ley James The Critic in the Modern World Public Criticism from Samuel Johnson to James Wood New York Bloomsbury Publishing USA 2014 Maclean Catherine Macdonald Born Under Saturn A Biography of William Hazlitt New York The Macmillan Company 1944 Mayhew Robert J Malthus The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet Cambridge Massachusetts Harvard University Press 2014 Milnes Tim Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2003 Natarajan Uttara Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense Criticism Morals and the Metaphysics of Power Oxford Clarendon Press 1998 Natarajan Uttara Paulin Tom and Wu Duncan eds Metaphysical Hazlitt Bicentenary Essays London and New York Routledge 2005 Park Roy Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age Abstraction and Critical Theory Oxford Clarendon Press 1971 Paulin Tom The Day Star of Liberty William Hazlitt s Radical Style London Faber and Faber 1998 Robinson Jeffrey Cane The Current of Romantic Passion Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1999 Rodden John Introduction Lionel Trilling and the Critics Opposing Selves Edited by John Rodden Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1999 Sampson George ed Hazlitt Selected Essays Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1958 Stephen Leslie 1894 Milton John 1608 1674 In Lee Sidney ed Dictionary of National Biography Vol 38 London Smith Elder amp Co p 32 Schneider Elisabeth W William Hazlitt In The English Romantic Poets amp Essayists A Review of Research and Criticism revised edition Edited by Carolyn Washburn Houtchens and Lawrence Huston Houtchens New York New York University Press and London University of London Press Limited 1957 1966 pp 75 113 Wardle Ralph M Hazlitt Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1971 Whelan Maurice In the Company of William Hazlitt Thoughts for the Twenty first Century London Merlin Press 2005 Wu Duncan William Hazlitt The First Modern Man Oxford and New York Oxford University Press 2008 Further reading editBate Jonathan The Cure for Love New York Picador 1998 Haverty Anne The Far Side of a Kiss New York Chatto amp Windus 2000 The Hazlitt Review ISSN 1757 8299 External links edit nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to William Hazlitt nbsp Wikiquote has quotations related to William Hazlitt nbsp Wikisource has original works by or about William Hazlitt nbsp Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article Hazlitt William Works by William Hazlitt in eBook form at Standard Ebooks Works by William Hazlitt at Project Gutenberg Works by or about William Hazlitt at Internet Archive Works by William Hazlitt at LibriVox public domain audiobooks nbsp Hazlitt Society official site Jazzing Up Hazlitt James Fenton on Hazlitt The New York Review of Books July 2009 A Memorial for Hazlitt by A C Grayling The Guardian 21 April 2001 Spirit of the age by Tom Paulin The Guardian 5 April 2003 William Hazlitt BBC Radio 4 In Our Time programme Portraits of William Hazlitt at the National Portrait Gallery London nbsp Archival material relating to William Hazlitt UK National Archives nbsp William Hazlitt Collection General Collection Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Hutchinson John 1892 William Hazlitt Men of Kent and Kentishmen Subscription ed Canterbury Cross amp Jackman pp 68 69 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title William Hazlitt amp oldid 1195902788, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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