My Friends and Acquaintance
William Hazlitt II
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II.
EARLY IMPRESSIONS CONNECTED WITH HIM.—HIS HOUSE IN YORK STREET, FORMERLY
THE RESIDENCE OF MILTON.—HIS TALK OF WORDSWORTH,
SOUTHEY, AND COLERIDGE.—HIS PASSION FOR TRUTH
AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.
It is, perhaps, worth remark, that my early intercourse with
William Hazlitt has left on my memory a
singularly vivid impression of the local circumstances and objects
connected with it. I remember every room in which I have seen him, as clearly as if I were
now sitting in it, and the exact situation and attitudes in which I was accustomed to see
him sit or stand when conversing with him. I make the observation, because it would not be
applicable to my intercourse with any other of the distinguished men of the day. The reason
probably is, that our susceptibility to external impressions at any given time, and our
consequent power of retaining them, is proportioned to the interest
we feel ![]()
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in the immediate source of those impressions. I have not
slightly or unduly appreciated and enjoyed the intercourse that has fallen to my lot with a
large proportion of the remarkable men of our day, in every department of human
acquirement; but I have never been induced to feel that any one of them claimed or
justified that profound intellectual study which I was always (in spite of myself) called
upon to apply in the case of William Hazlitt; or it may be that he
alone was always susceptible of that study, by reason of the
beautifully simple and natural cast of his character; in which spring and evidence of true
greatness of capacity, I do not believe him to have been surpassed by any man that ever
lived. If “to know a man truly were to know himself,”
then was William Hazlitt’s character, though the least common in
the world, so legibly written in his daily conduct and converse, that for those who saw
much of him to mistake it was next to impossible. Yet no character was ever so mistaken and
misrepresented.
Leaving the onus of this charge to be ![]()
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divided between the wilful blindness of his friends and the wilful
falsehood of his enemies, I will say, that I believe the certainty of not coming away
empty-handed was the secret of the strong and unwearied interest that I always felt in his
society, even at the very time when I felt an inexpressible horror and dread of his
supposed personal character,—as was the case at the time I am now speaking of. From all
that I had heard, both from his enemies (and even from his so-called friends) and the
little I had hitherto seen for myself, I looked upon him, personally, as little better than
an incarnate fiend: and those who recollect the looks that
occasionally came over him (as if, against his will, to warn bystanders of their danger)
will scarcely deem this an exaggerated description of the feeling. Yet my desire to see and
know him was not the less strong and urgent; and hence, as I conceive, the peculiar
vividness with which I retain my impressions of the local circumstances under which we met.
I went to him in York Street, in consequence of the note referred to above;
and, though I have never since (until this mo-![]()
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ment) attempted to recal
the scene, it lives before me now as if it were of yesterday. On knocking at the door, it
was, after a long interval, opened by a sufficiently “neat-handed” domestic.
The outer door led immediately from the street (down a step) into an empty apartment,
indicating an uninhabited house, and I supposed I had mistaken the number; but, on asking
for the object of my search, I was shown to a door which opened (a step from the ground) on
to a ladder-like staircase, bare like the rest, which led to a dark bare landing-place, and
thence to a large square wainscotted apartment. The great curtainless windows of this room
looked upon some dingy trees; the whole of the wall, over and about the chimney-piece, was
entirely covered, up to the ceiling, by names written in pencil, of all sizes and
characters, and in all directions—commemorative of visits of curiosity to “the house
of Pindarus.”* There was, near to the empty
fireplace, a table with breakfast things upon it
* The house had been the residence of Milton, and now belonged to Jeremy Bentham, over whose garden it looked. |
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(though it was two o’clock in the afternoon); three chairs and
a sofa were standing about the room, and one unbound book lay on the mantelpiece. At the
table sat Hazlitt, and on the sofa a lady, whom I
found to be his wife.
My reception was not very inviting; and it struck me at once (what had not
occurred to me before) that in asking facilities for criticising William Hazlitt in “Blackwood’s Magazine,” I had taken a step open to
the suspicion of either mischief or mystification, or both. However, I soon satisfied him
that my object and design were anything but unfriendly. To be what he called
“puffed” in so unlooked-for a quarter was evidently deemed a god-send; it put
him in excellent humour accordingly; and the “Lake Poets” being mentioned, and
finding me something of a novice in such matters (and moreover an excellent listener), he
talked for a couple of hours, without intermission, on those “personal themes,”
which he evidently “loved best,” and with which, in this instance, he mixed up
that spice of malice which was never, or rarely, absent from his discourse about his
quondam friends, Wordsworth, ![]()
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Coleridge, and Southey, and which so strangely interfered with his general estimate of
their pretensions—or rather (for such I believe to have been the case) with that perfect
good faith with which he was accustomed to give his estimates to
the world: for I believe the above-named were the only instances in which he did not say of
celebrated men all the good that he thought, as well as the bad. But
to put the seal of his critical fiat to the fame of men whom he believed to have treated
him personally as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Southey were supposed by him to have done, was scarcely in human
nature.
The above was my first initiation into themes of this nature; and I must
confess that the way in which Hazlitt stripped off
the attributes of divinity with which I had hitherto invested those idols of my boyish
worship, was not so unpalatable to my taste as I should myself have expected it to be. The
truth is, we are not sorry to learn that any of our fellow-beings are less immaculate or
superlative in personal character than our imaginations, excited by
their written works, ![]()
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had led us to suppose them: nor do I know that
it in the least degree interferes with the effect which their works are calculated to
produce upon us afterwards, or to impair those we already possess. On the contrary, it
perhaps aggrandises our impressions of them, from the seeming inadequacy of the source
whence they flow, and soothes our personal feelings into the belief that we ourselves are
not so immeasurably inferior to these “gods of the earth” as we had been
accustomed to deem ourselves. We do not think the less of Shakspeare for being told that he was a link-boy or a deer-stealer; and we
do think very considerably less of Goethe from knowing that he was, for his worldly wisdom, deemed fit to be
the privy councillor, and for his unimpeachable morals and manners the personal friend and
associate, of an absolute prince. The only difference is, that after the new light has come
to us, the product is thenceforth one thing, and the producer another; whereas they were
before inextricably linked and blended together; and our impressions of the latter, as
derived from the former, besides being altogether ![]()
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gratuitous, were
infinitely more likely to be the false interpretation than the true one. To which it may be
added, that what the human soul instinctively yearns for and reaches after, as the hart
pants for the water-brooks, is not this or that vague generality, or empty and unmeaning
abstraction, but the truth. Whatever it may be, or wheresoever
it may lead, truth is the goal to which the undiverted tendency of the human mind points
all its affections; and it is never satisfied or at rest till this is reached. The natural
and healthful condition of any given mind may, in a great degree, be estimated by the
strength or weakness with which it retains and is acted upon by this bias; and the
lingering love which is perpetually pointing to it, after it has been destroyed by the
conventional ordinances of the world, is a proof and a measure of its original amount. We
love all other things for something else not inherent in themselves; but we love the truth
for itself alone. In this sense it is that “Beauty is Truth, Truth
Beauty.” We desire, first and foremost, to know what a
thing is: it is time ![]()
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enough afterwards to inquire the why and
wherefore—the how and when. These are very well as matters of amusement and curiosity; but
the truth is the only pabulum of our mental and moral existence—the only real necessity—the
only veritable “staff of life.” We can live by it in health and vigour,
deprived of all other things; and with all others, that wanting, we pine and pule and fret away our fruitless days, in an empty and
uneasy search after that which is not to be found. Nor when the truth is once attained on
any given point of inquiry, is the searcher at a moment’s loss in the recognition of
it, nor does he seek to proceed another step in his pursuit. They say “marriages are
made in heaven,” and that when the objects destined for each other meet, the
recognition is instant and mutual. At least it is so with Truth and the Human Soul; and it
is a marriage which, when once consummated, cannot know division or divorce. We may pass
from the cradle to the grave without meeting with this bride of our souls; or we may meet
with a thousand “false Florizels,” and ![]()
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mistake each of them for the true one; but we cannot meet with the
true one and mistake or reject her. It is not in the nature of
things.
The reader will I hope excuse this digression, in favour of the occasion
which suggested itself; for if ever there was a human mind devoted and self-sacrificed to
the love of truth, it was that of William Hazlitt;
and he pursued the search of it with a fearless pertinacity only equalled by the sagacity
which pointed out and applied the means and materials of the discovery. This love of truth
was the leading feature of his mind, and it was the key to all its weaknesses, errors, and
inconsistencies, as well as to all its extraordinary powers and the successful application
of them. He used to boast of being “a good hater.” If the boast and the habit
were uncharitable ones, they were the offspring of that love of truth which was the passion
of his soul, and that power of eliciting it which was the great characteristic of his
intellect. If, while conscious of his own errors and failings, he felt and expressed too
bitter a scorn for those of others, it was because others, instead of ![]()
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owning and despising their frailties as he did, insist on monstering them into virtues and
subjects of personal vanity, and the world abets and encourages them in the mischievous
self-deception. If, instead of being content to use his great powers in calmly exposing the
false pretensions of the world to that contempt which they merit, he was too apt to seize
upon them with a savage fury, and tear them to pieces, as the wild beast tears and rends
the cloak that is flung upon it to blind its eyes from the attacks of its enemies, it was
because his self-control was less than his detestation of the debasing consequences that
spring from the admission of those pretensions; it was because it drove him mad to see
whole nations, generation after generation, dragged like slaves and idiots at the
chariot-wheels of a few empty and vulgar idols—bound there by liliputian threads that a
breath might have broken.
This first lengthened interview of mine with Hazlitt ended by his promising to let me have the MS. of his lectures, to
do what I pleased with, and we parted on a better footing than we had met; though evidently
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with as little prospect as before of our ever becoming intimate
associates:—for the way in which he handled his quondam friends, as above described, did
anything but decrease the dread I had been taught to entertain of his personal character.
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
The founder of Utilitarianism; author of
Principles of Morals and
Legislation (1789).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
English poet and philosopher who projected
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
with William Wordsworth; author of
Biographia Literaria (1817),
On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and other
works.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832)
German poet, playwright, and novelist; author of
The Sorrows of Young
Werther (1774) and
Faust (1808, 1832).
Sarah Hazlitt [née Stoddart] (1774-1840)
The daughter of John Stoddart (1742-1803), lieutenant in the Royal Navy; she married
William Hazlitt in 1808 and was divorced in 1822.
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).
John Milton (1608-1674)
English poet and controversialist; author of
Comus (1634),
Lycidas (1638),
Areopagitica (1644),
Paradise Lost (1667), and other works.
Pindar (522 BC c.-443 BC)
Greek lyric poet who celebrated athletic victories in elaborate odes that became models
for intricate and often elliptical odes in English.
Robert Southey (1774-1843)
Poet laureate and man of letters whose contemporary reputation depended upon his prose
works, among them the
Life of Nelson, 2 vols (1813),
History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (1823-32) and
The Doctor, 7 vols (1834-47).
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
With Coleridge, author of
Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth
survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. (1817-1980). Begun as the
Edinburgh Monthly Magazine,
Blackwood's assumed the name of its proprietor, William Blackwood after the sixth
number. Blackwood was the nominal editor until 1834.
