My Friends and Acquaintance
William Hazlitt XIX
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XIX.
HAZLITT’S PERSONAL OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES OF HIS
CONTEMPORARIES.—LEIGH HUNT.
It often used to occasion me no less surprise than regret to
find that Hazlitt did not duly appreciate the genius
and writings of Mr. Leigh Hunt; or rather let me confine
the remark to Mr. Hunt’s writings;
for his genius and talents were not underrated by Hazlitt. That their
results were sometimes disparaged, or their merits overlooked, is to be attributed to
various causes, arising out of the personal character of the two men, and their intimacy
with each other. If Hazlitt had not been in habits of personal
intercourse with Hunt, he would have estimated his literary efforts
justly. But, with Hazlitt, “to know a man truly, was to know
himself” and therefore not
to know that which is but an offset and emanation from him. Probably no man ever formed a
just critical estimate of the writings of his personal intimate. It is scarcely possible to
do so even of one’s ![]()
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contemporary, though he may be personally
unknown to us. There never was a more just and enlightened critical spirit abroad than that
which prevails in the present day. Yet not one of our estimates of contemporary genius will
be exactly confirmed by posterity—which is the only final and infallible judge in such
matters. But for a man to estimate the literary character of his personal intimate, or his
personal enemy, is not in human nature. He might almost as reasonably hope to estimate his
own. And yet we are apt to think we know more about our friends—not to mention
ourselves—than strangers can possibly do. And so, perhaps, we do. We know too much, and
therefore do not know any part accurately, still less the whole—which, to be seen and
measured justly, must be seen at a certain distance, and as a whole.
Hazlitt saw in Mr. Leigh
Hunt’s writings—and saw with an almost preternatural acuteness of
vision—what we have no right to see at all, and what none but his personal intimates do or
can see—the secret workings and results of those personal feelings (call them failings if
you please—their owner is ![]()
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too wise as well as too liberal in his
self-knowledge to be offended at the phrase) which more or less beset and modify the mental
operations of every deep and original thinker, and still more of one (as in the instance
before us) whose personal feelings blend with and give colour to all his meditations.
At a very early period of Mr. Leigh
Hunt’s literary career, his remarkable social qualities had gathered
round him a coterie of that class of admirers who are too apt to take the form of
adulators, and who, in this latter phase of their character, are not merely inclined, but
impelled, to overlook the loftier qualities and attributes of their idol, in order to
monster his smaller merits, or metamorphose his errors and short-comings into beauties and
virtues.
The consequence for a time was, that the young and happily-constituted
writer
“To persons gave up what was meant for
mankind;” |
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never wholly deserting or misusing his high calling, but not seldom postponing its
duties to the delights of social success and individual admiration; confiding (as every man
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of genius is impelled and bound to do) in his own judgment and
his own consciousness, as to the uses and applications of those fine qualities and
capacities of his mind which his adulators failed to see or to comprehend; but believing in
and abiding by them in all the rest.*
This state of things—a happy one perhaps for him whom they touched most
nearly, but a sad one for those who already looked to him for the due exercise of his high
and rare powers of affording mingled instruction and delight to his fellow-creatures—has
long since given place to one more consonant to the nature and tendency of those powers,
and their just claims to the distinctions which they confer on their possessor; and I only
recur to it now to account for the insufficient impression which Hazlitt entertained of the writings of Mr. Hunt, and their future influence on the moral and
intellectual character of the age. Hazlitt saw and grieved at the
state of things I
* I gather these details and impressions from Hazlitt. I had not the pleasure of Mr. Leigh Hunt’s acquaintance at the time
referred to. |
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have described; then grew vexed and angry at it; (these latter
feelings being not wholly unmixed, I am afraid, with a touch of personal envy at the
“earthlier happy” condition of his friend as compared with his own); till at
last his personal feelings blended and interfered with all his impressions respecting the
writings of his friend and fellow-labourer, and gave to his judgment that sinister bias
which it was so apt to take, or rather so incapable of escaping, on all questions of
contemporary merit and distinction.
It is true that Hazlitt has in
numerous instances, and in various quarters, used the influence of his pen and his critical
powers to disseminate opinions, just, as far as they go, respecting the literary
pretensions of this delightful and accomplished writer. He, perhaps, did more for Mr. Hunt’s reputation in this respect than any other
writer of his day. But, besides having done this more as a set-off against the gratuitous
calumnies of his enemies and maligners than as a spontaneous tribute to the merits of the
man, he has fallen miserably short, as I conceive, of conveying a clear and full impression
of Mr. ![]()
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Hunt’s intellectual pretensions, and still more so in estimating
the actual, and anticipating the future, results of those pretensions upon the social
character and condition of this country.
But it will, I fear, be felt that I am transgressing the true limits of my
design. Returning to more purely personal matters, I may say, that though Hazlitt took great pleasure in Mr.
Hunt’s society, it was not the kind of social intercourse he best
liked. It was one in which each party sought to shine in the eyes of each other, or of the
persons present, if any. And though this desire is perhaps more successful in producing the
power and the result it aims at than any other means, yet to shine
in conversation is not to enjoy it; to talk brilliantly, or to hear
brilliant talk, is not to talk or to listen with the heart; it includes and supposes none
of that effusion of individual feeling, and that exercise and interchange of human
sympathy—none of that “flow of soul” in the absence of which, talk (be
it even that of the brightest wits and choicest spirits of the time) is but “as a
tinkling cymbal,” or as ![]()
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the tittle-tattle of
club-compelled exquisites and tea-drinking Abigails.
How delightful is the kind of talk I have alluded to! It is, of all
intellectual enjoyments, at once the most perfect and the most ennobling; because it is of
all others the least impaired by those debasing contradictions and weaknesses which blend
more or less with all our pleasures—even with this—and cloud their brightness, while they
weaken their force and fullness. This welling forth of the springs of affection and of
passion in the human heart has always seemed to me precisely analogous to the singing of
birds; a spontaneous and involuntary effusion from the hidden and mysterious sources of
delight; rising in beauty and in melody with the character of its utterer, from the poor
twittering of the sparrow on the house-top, to the intense and passionate warbling of the
nightingale in the deep recesses of a solemn wood at midnight; but in each case created,
called forth, and modified by something external from its source; sinking into and growing
out of that, as the waves in water, or the sounds of a wind-swept lute; and in no case to
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thoroughly enjoyed except (as with the birds) between co-mates in
kindness and in love. When the nightingale, in the antique story, sought to rival the music
of the human minstrel, she put forth miracles of bright sounds, but her heart burst in the
unnatural struggle. And thus it is with us “human mortals.” One man may rouse
and stir an assembled nation by his eloquence; another may teach a great multitude by his
knowledge; a third may “keep the table in a roar” by his wit; a fourth
may lap his hearers in Elysium by his fancy or imagination; and so forth. But there is no
real enjoyment of talk except in a tête-à-tête
between friends or lovers; no free pouring forth of the feelings and affections that make
up our intellectual being, except where there exists that frank interchange of sympathy
which prompts us to listen with as eager an interest as we feel in speaking, and which at
the same time satisfies us that we, in our turn, are listened to with a corresponding
pleasure.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
English essayist and literary critic; author of
Characters of
Shakespeare's Plays (1817),
Lectures on the English Poets
(1818), and
The Spirit of the Age (1825).
James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)
English poet, journalist, and man of letters; editor of
The
Examiner and
The Liberal; friend of Byron, Keats, and
Shelley.
