FullReads

This is quite true if we add a proviso to it–a proviso, to be sure, of no small importance. Hazlitt is always the same when he is not different, when his political or personal ails and angers do not obscure his critical judgment. His uniformity of principle extends only to the two subjects of literature and of art; unless a third may be added, to wit, the various good things of this life, as they are commonly called. He was not so great a metaphysician as he thought himself. He “shows to the utmost of his knowledge, and that not deep”; a want of depth not surprising when we find him confessing that he had to go to Taylor, the Platonist, to tell him something of Platonic ideas. It may be more than suspected that he had read little but the French and English philosophers of the eighteenth century; a very interesting class of persons, but, except Condillac, Hume, and Berkeley, scarcely metaphysicians. As for his politics, Hazlitt seems to me to have had no clear political creed at all. He hated something called “the hag legitimacy,” but for the hag despotism, in the person of Bonaparte, he had nothing but love. How any one possessed of brains could combine Liberty and the first Napoleon in one common worship is, I confess, a mystery too great for me; and I fear that any one who could call “Jupiter Scapin” “the greatest man who ever lived,” must be entirely blind to such constituents of greatness as justice, mercy, chivalry, and all that makes a gentleman. Indeed, I am afraid that “gentleman” is exactly what cannot be predicated of Hazlitt. No gentleman could have published the Liber Amoris, not at all because of its so-called voluptuousness, but because of its shameless kissing and telling. But the most curious example of Hazlitt’s weaknesses is the language he uses in regard to those men with whom he had both political and literary differences. That he had provocation in some cases (he had absolutely none from Sir Walter Scott) is perfectly true. But what provocation will excuse such things as the following, all taken from one book, the Spirit of the Age ? He speaks of Scott’s “zeal to restore the spirit of loyalty, of passive obedience, and of non-resistance,” as an acknowledgment for his having been “created a baronet by a prince of the House of Brunswick.” Alas for dates and circumstances, for times and seasons, when they stand in the way of a fling of Hazlitt’s! In the character of Scott himself an entire page and a half is devoted to an elaborate peroration in one huge sentence, denouncing him in such terms as “pettifogging,” “littleness,” “pique,” “secret and envenomed blows,” “slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn,” “trammels of servility,” “lies,” “garbage,” etc. etc. The Duke of Wellington he always speaks of as a brainless noodle, forgetting apparently that the description does not make his idol’s defeat more creditable to the vanquished. As for the character of Gifford, and the earlier “Letter to Gifford,” I should have to print them entire to show the state of Hazlitt’s mind in regard to this notorious, and certainly not very amiable person. His own words, “the dotage of age and the fury of a woman,” form the best short description of both. He screams, he foams at the mouth, he gnashes and tears and kicks, rather than fights. Nor is it only on living authors and living persons (as some of his unfavourable critics have said) that he exercises his spleen. His remarks on Burke ( Round Table, p. 150) suggest temporary insanity. Sir Philip Sidney (as Lamb, a perfectly impartial person who had no politics at all, pointed out) was a kind of representative of the courtly monarchist school in literature. So down must Sir Philip go; and not only the Arcadia, that “vain and amatorious poem” which Milton condemned, but the sonnets which one would have thought such a lover of poetry as Hazlitt must have spared, go down also before his remorseless bludgeon.