My Friends and Acquaintance
William Hazlitt XVI
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XVI.
HAZLITT WITH HIS INTIMATES.—WILLIAM HONE, THE
PARODIST.—HIS AMIABLE CHARACTER.—EVENINGS AT THE SOUTHAMPTON.—THE FORCE OE IMAGINATION.
If I were required to name the person among all Hazlitt’s intimates in whose society he seemed to
take the most unmingled pleasure—or I should perhaps rather say, with whom he felt himself
most at ease and “comfortable”—I should say it was the late William Hone, author of the celebrated
“Parodies,” &c. With almost everybody else Hazlitt
seemed to feel some degree of restraint on some point or other. With some (as with
Northcote for instance) he seemed to feel
himself bound to listen more than he liked to listen; with others he felt called upon to
talk more than it pleased him to talk. With one class of persons—the professed literati of
the day—he tried to shine; with another class—the opposite of the ![]()
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above—he tried not to shine, but, on the contrary, to be and to seem
not a whit superior to those about him. In the company of females, whoever they might be,
or of whatever class—even with those few who were uniformly kind and cordial in their
reception and treatment of him, and of whose respect and good-will he could not reasonably
doubt—there was always apparent a dash of melancholy and despondency; and also a resentful
feeling, which showed itself from time to time, not in anything he said, but in the fearful
expression which used to pass across his face, and which he never even attempted to
suppress or conceal—an expression that can only be described by saying that it gave the
look of an incarnate demon’s to a face that, in the absence of that look, indicated
the highest and noblest attributes of the human intellect and character. In speaking of
this look, I may remark that, though no obvious cause was ever
apparent for it, I never remember to have once observed it without being able immediately
to assign the cause, even though I may inadvertently have given it myself—for it was ![]()
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always something touching more or less remotely or nearly the personal condition and circumstances of the man; and I might add, it
was almost always connected with one of three topics—the downfall of Napoleon—the abuse of some deserving writer from party
motives—and (in the case where females were present) in reference to the passion of Love.
On each of these topics there existed a morbid part in Hazlitt’s
mind, which no one—friend, foe, or perfect stranger—could touch, or even approach, without
exciting a feeling of mingled agony and resentment, that showed itself as I have just
described. These topics were strings in the noble instrument of his mind which had been so
early and violently overstrained, that nothing could ever restore them to their healthful
temperament, or cause them to give out tones capable of making anything but “harsh
discords,” or music the pathos of which was lost in the pain.
But in the company of females, the dreadful look I have spoken of (for such
it was) used to come over Hazlitt’s face much
more frequently than at any other time; because ![]()
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the great source of
those agonized feelings which called it forth was connected with that habitual and almost
insane fear I have before alluded to, that no woman could look upon him without a feeling
of mingled terror and distaste at least, if not disgust.
If I have been tempted to notice more at length than it may seem to deserve
this singular feature in Hazlitt’s social and
personal character, it is because it was fraught with an almost painfully pathetic
interest, that has perhaps never been equalled, either in kind or degree, even in
fictitious narrative, except in that divine Eastern story of Beauty and
the Beast.
It has been my lot during the last fifteen years to associate more or less
familiarly with a large proportion of the most intellectual men of an age which perhaps
deserves to be characterised as the most intellectual that the world ever knew; and I
confess that no part of such intercourse has connected itself with more perfectly pleasant
recollections and associations than do the three or four evenings that I remember to have
spent with ![]()
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Hazlitt and Hone, in the little dingy wainscoted coffee-room* of the Southampton Arms,
in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. There, after having dreamed and lingered at home
over his beloved tea from five or six o’clock till ten or so at night,
Hazlitt used to go every evening, for years, to take his supper
(or dinner, as the case might be) of either cold roast beef or rumpsteak and apple tart;
for he rarely tasted anything else but these—never by choice, unless it were a roast fowl,
a pheasant, or a brace of partridges, when his funds happened to be unusually flourishing.
And there you were sure to find him, in his favourite box on the right-hand side of the
fireplace, sitting (if alone) upright, motionless, and silent as an effigy, brooding over
his own thoughts, and, at the same time, taking in and turning to intellectual account
every word that was uttered by the few persons who used at that time habitually to frequent
the house, and to most of whom he was known; at the same
* Since (as I have hinted in a previous section, see vol. ii. p.
317), “improved from off the face of the earth,” for all
purposes of old local association. |
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time, casting furtive glances at the door every time it gave
intimation of opening, partly in the hope, partly in the fear, that the in-comer might be
some one of his own particular intimates, who came there, as he knew, solely to seek him.
I say that he looked for a companion under these circumstances with a mixed
feeling of hope and fear. In fact, it was always a moot point whether Hazlitt liked better to be alone with his own thoughts and
imaginations, or interchanging them with those of other people; nor do I believe that he
himself could ever have decided the point satisfactorily to himself in any given case. But
when accident decided it, the result seemed sure to be the right one—always provided the
party disjoining him from himself did not happen to be one of those three or four unlucky
individuals towards whom he felt a sort of constitutional antipathy—as some men do to cats.
But such was his humane sense of the forbearance and toleration we owe to each other, and
his delicate consideration in exercising these, that even the persons in question were sure
to go away with ![]()
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the impression that they had made themselves
peculiarly agreeable to him. And even if the truth happened to be so exactly the other way
that he could bear the infliction no longer, the worst he used to do was to plead illness
(as he safely might—for this sort of thing disturbed his whole system for a day or two),
get up, and go away to the theatre—begging they would come and sit with him some other
night!
There was something in the social and intellectual character of William Hone peculiarly suited to the simple, natural, and
humane cast of Hazlitt’s mind—using the latter epithet in its broad and general
sense, as implying a sympathy with all the qualities of our nature—its weaknesses no less
than its strengths. His manner (I speak of him when in Hazlitt’s
society—where alone I was accustomed to see him) united the most perfect freedom,
familiarity, and bonhommie, with that delicate deference and respect
which the extraordinary intellectual powers of Hazlitt were calculated
to excite in all who were capable of duly appreciating them. He also never failed to keep
Hazlitt in that active ![]()
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good-humour with himself which was so
indispensable to his personal comfort, and to that of all who conversed with him. And he
effected this by a species of flattery which is not merely innocent in itself, but is the
just meed of high intellectual superiority, and is never withheld from it but by those who
either envy its pretensions or dispute them; a flattery which consists in the instant
recognition and allowance of any new light thrown upon the topic of converse, or any false
one dispelled, in place of that petty and paltry disputation for disputation’s sake
which is the miserable characteristic of all ordinary English conversation—even of that
which formally claims that name; in short, that flattery which consists in the delighted
admission and reception of the Truth the instant it is made apparent to us, instead of the
dogged denial of it on that very account, and because we ourselves have hitherto been blind
to it, or have seen its semblance in error and falsehood.
There was also about Hone a buoyancy
and joyousness of spirit which, wherever Hazlitt met
with it, acted upon his memory ![]()
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and imagination in a beautiful and
affecting manner. Himself the very type of intellectual dejection and despondency, the mere
sight of the opposites of these in others, instead of aggravating the malady, as it does in
most cases, utterly dispelled it for the moment, and made him feel, not joyous himself, but
as if he could become so if he chose by the mere force of those fine sympathies with his
fellow-beings which kept the constitutional melancholy of his temperament from sinking into
that fatal disease which it so often assumes. For the effect I speak of was not a mere
association of ideas, carrying him back in imagination to the time when he himself was
buoyant and happy; it was a complex action, arising, as I conceive, chiefly out of his deep
and universal sympathies with human nature, but modified and blended, no doubt, by and with
his unconscious recollections of that period of his life when “he too was an
Arcadian.” It was an association that not merely “played round his
head,” but “touched his heart” also.
In illustration of this sort of complex association of ideas, and its
effect upon a ![]()
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mind made up, like Hazlitt’s, of almost equal proportions of our intellectual and our
sentient natures, I will here refer to a simple fact that many of his associates must have
observed as well as myself, and which never occurred without exciting in me an interest
almost painful, yet blended with a peculiar and touching pleasure, precisely corresponding
with that which we derive from unexpected touches of nature in lyrical or pastoral poetry.
I have already stated that, from the time of my first acquaintance with him,
Hazlitt had been a determined water-drinker. No temptation ever
induced him to transgress his rule of life in this respect; the only rule he ever
prescribed to himself, or could have been likely to keep if he had. But this rule had been
imposed upon him by the moral certainty that his life would be the cost of neglecting it;
for, in the early part of his literary career in London, he had been led into an
intemperate use of stimulants, which had at length wholly destroyed the healthful tone of
his digestive organs, and made the utmost caution necessary to prevent those attacks, under
one of which he died.
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Of course, in our evening meetings at the Southampton and elsewhere, a
glass of grog, or something of the kind, was not wanting to give that social flavour to our
table-talk which was one of its most pleasant qualities. Indeed, Hazlitt himself could never bear to see the table wholly
empty of some emblem of that “taking one’s ease at one’s inn,”
which was a favourite feeling and phrase with him; and immediately his supper-cloth was
removed (for his corporeal enjoyment on these occasions was confined
to the somewhat solid but brief one of a pound or so of rump steak or cold roast beef), he
used to be impatient to know what we were each of us going to take; and, as each in turn
determined the important point, he would taste it with us in
imagination. It was his frequent and almost habitual practice, the moment the first glass
was placed upon the table after supper, to take it up as if to carry it to his lips, then
to stop for a few moments before it reached them, and then smell to the liquor and draw in
the fumes, as if they were “a rich distilled perfume.” He would then put the
glass down slowly, without uttering a word; and ![]()
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you might sometimes
see the tears start into his eyes, while he drew in his breath to the uttermost, and then
sent it forth in a half sigh, half yawn, that seemed to come from the very depths of his
heart. At other times he would put the glass down with a less dejected feeling, and exclaim
in a tone of gusto that would have done honour to the most earnest of gastronomes over the
last mouthful of his actual ortolan, “That’s fine, by
G—d!” literally exhilarating, and almost intoxicating, himself with the bare
imagination of it. He used almost invariably to finish this movement by falling back into a
brief fit of dejection, as if stricken with remorse at the irreparable injury he had
committed against himself, in having, by an intemperate abuse of a manifest good, for ever
interdicted himself from the use of it; for no man ever needed more the judicious use of
stimulants, or would, if he could have borne them, have found more unmingled benefit from
them. But to him that which could alone have medicined his mental ills, was nothing less
than deadly poison to his body.
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).
William Hone (1780-1842)
English bookseller, radical, and antiquary; he was an associate of Bentham, Mill, and
John Cam Hobhouse.
Emperor Napoleon I (1769-1821)
Military leader, First Consul (1799), and Emperor of the French (1804), after his
abdication he was exiled to Elba (1814); after his defeat at Waterloo he was exiled to St.
Helena (1815).
James Northcote (1746-1831)
English portrait-painter and writer who exhibited at the Royal Academy; he wrote a
Life of Titian (1830).
