My Friends and Acquaintance
William Hazlitt IV
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IV.
DINNER WITH HAZLITT AT JOHN
SCOTT’S.—ANECDOTES OF LORD BYRON WHEN AT
VIENNA.—HAZLITT’S LONELY HABITS AND CHARACTER.
Shortly after the period of my receiving the above explanation
of Hazlitt’s supposed outrage upon me, I was
sitting one morning with the late John Scott, at his
lodgings in York Street, Covent Garden, when he told me that he was every moment expecting
Hazlitt to call on him by appointment; and knowing my then feelings about the attack in the magazine (for it was he who
had furnished me with an explanation of it, and from Hazlitt’s
own lips), he proposed that I should meet him—but not then—for he felt that it would not be
safe to introduce Hazlitt unprepared into the room with a man whom he
(Hazlitt) felt that he had outraged. In fact, so intense was
Hazlitt’s sense of what was due to a man’s immediate
personal feelings when face to face with him, that he would
never have forgiven Scott the ![]()
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indiscretion of bringing himself and me together again, without the
full consent of both parties. Briefly, it was settled that we should dine with
Scott the same day, if Hazlitt did not
object; and accordingly we met as if nothing had happened; for
Hazlitt’s sensitiveness on matters of this nature precluded
the slightest allusion to the indirect occasion of our meeting, nor was it ever afterwards
referred to in the most remote manner; and the rest of the day (and night) was spent in
talk such as I scarcely remember to have enjoyed either before or since. I never knew
Hazlitt so entertaining and brilliant, yet so subtle, penetrating,
and profound. He seemed determined to make me amends for the undeserved injury he had done
me. It was also, I remember, the first fair renewal of John
Scott’s intimacy with him, which had been broken off for several
years; and they mutually made it the occasion of such a vivid and various calling back of
the scenes, characters, and histories of the then, alas! defunct coterie who were
accustomed to meet at Basil Montague’s,
Charles Lamb’s, Leigh Hunt’s, and all those who had once “called ![]()
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Admiral Burney friend,” that I became
as familiar with them all as if I had been one among them—a boon the bestowal of which was
like adding a score of years to one’s life, “without the illness should
attend them.” Scott, too, who had recently returned from
a lengthened residence in Italy, had many excellent things to tell, which were new to
Hazlitt (who was as good a listener as he was a talker); in
particular, several capital ones about Lord Byron, with
whom he had been recently spending a week at Venice.
Two of these anecdotes I particularly remember. Until their meeting at
Venice, there had been an estrangement between Byron and
Scott, in consequence of the part the latter had
taken in the “Champion,” relative
to the publication of the celebrated “Farewell;” but they were now reconciled, and were on the water together
in Byron’s gondola, under circumstances which led
Scott to express a strong sense of danger as to their position.
“Oh!” said Byron, in a tone of perfect
seriousness, “you need not be afraid of anything happening to you while you are
with me, for we are friends now.” And
Scott
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explained that Byron had the most intimate
persuasion, that any of his friends who had quarrelled with him were never safe from some
strange accident, until they had made it up.
The other anecdote related to one of those bonnes
fortunes on which Byron so much
piqued himself. He told Scott, that during the
hey-day of his popularity, he was on a visit at a noble house in the country, where a large
party of both sexes was assembled; and that among them was a lady of rank, beauty and
immaculate reputation, with whom he fell desperately in love, and determined to urge his
passion, notwithstanding the presence of her husband, to whom she was evidently attached.
For several days his unwearied assiduities produced no effect beyond that of an evident
desire, on the lady’s part, to avoid them without infringing the usages of society.
Two or three times, during the siege and defence, Byron had taken
opportunities of offering the lady a billet-doux, in which he had
expressed his passion in terms not, as he thought, to be resisted by mortal woman, at least
in the class of society in ![]()
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which this one moved; but on every
occasion she had contrived to avoid the proffered insult, without being obliged to
recognise it as such. At last, as Byron declared, he grew desperate,
and determined to run all risks rather than be foiled in his pursuit. Confident in what he
believed to be his knowledge of the female heart, he contrived to be conversing with the
lady, in a billiard-room that was situated apart from the rest of the house, at the precise
moment when he knew that her husband would enter the room. The husband entered: at that moment Byron pressed into her hand his
letter; in the alarm and confusion of the moment she took
it—concealed it hastily—he instantly left her—and (so, at least,
Byron declared) the daring ruse succeeded!
She “deliberated” for an instant whether or not she should denounce to her
husband the insulting outrage; and in that instant she was lost!
Such was Byron’s account of one of
the many love-passages of his strange life. Let those believe it who can.
From this night it was that my intimacy with
Hazlitt commenced. Henceforward, ![]()
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with the exception of two or three brief intervals, when either
Hazlitt or I was abroad, we met almost daily; and although our
intercourse was wholly free from conventional restraint, neither of us ever disguising or
concealing an opinion or a sentiment in deference to those of the other, our intimacy was
never broken, or even jarred or disturbed, from the above-named period to that of his
death—an interval of more than twelve years! This fact may well bear a note of admiration
for those who knew the nature of Hazlitt’s mind and temperament,
and the doubts, suspicions, and misgivings to which they perpetually made him a prey, and
the total incapacity that he laboured under, of abstaining from acting
upon those doubts and suspicions as if they were demonstrated truths.
On the other hand, it is proper for me to caution the reader against
supposing that, at any period of our intercourse, anything like a friendship subsisted between Hazlitt and
myself, in the “sentimental” sense of the phrase. It was a melancholy defect of
his mind, that it was wholly incapable of either ![]()
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exciting or
entertaining any such sentiment. I have (with deep reluctance) glanced at one of the natural reasons of this sad deficiency. Others of an adventitious
character, but more than sufficient to account for it, will develope themselves hereafter.
In the meantime, it is no less true than it may seem paradoxical, that, with the most social disposition of any man I ever met with, and an active and
ever-present sympathy with the claims, the wants, and the feelings of every human being he
approached, Hazlitt was, even by nature, but by circumstances still
more so, a lone man, living, moving, and having his being, for and
to himself exclusively; as utterly cut off from fulfilling and exercising the ordinary
pursuits and affections of his kind, and of his nature, as if he had been bound hand and
foot in a dungeon, or banished to a desert. And so, indeed, he was—bound in the gloomiest
of all dungeons—that built for us by our own unbridled passions—banished to that dreariest
of all deserts, spread out for us by seared hopes and blighted affections.
We are told that on the summit of one of those columns which form the
magnificent ![]()
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ruins of Hadrian’s Temple, in the plain of Athens, there used to dwell a
hermit, who never descended from his strangely-chosen abode; owing his scanty food and
support to the mingled admiration and curiosity of the peasants who inhabited the plain
below. Something like this was the position of William
Hazlitt, from the period at which I first became acquainted with him.
Self-banished from the social world, no less by the violence of his own passions, than by
those petty regards of custom and society which could not or would not tolerate the
trifling aberrations from external form and usage engendered by a mind like his; at the
same time, those early hopes, born of the French Revolution, which first awakened his soul
from its ante-natal sleep, blighted in their very fruition, and the stream that fed them
flung back upon its source, to stagnate there, and turn into a poisonous hatred of the
supposed causes of their disappointment; his spirit refused to look abroad or be comforted.
Such being the melancholy condition of his intellectual being at the period I am speaking
of, he became, as regarded himself ![]()
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personally, heedless of all things
but the immediate gratification of his momentary wants or wishes; careless of personal
character, indifferent to literary fame, forgetful of the past, reckless of the future; and
yet so exquisitely alive to the claims and the virtues of all these, that the abandonment
of his birthright in every one of them opened a separate canker in his heart, and made his
life a living emblem of that early death which it foretokened.
Thus (like the hermit alluded to above) perpetually surrounded by objects of
interest, beauty, and grandeur, and enabled by the elevated position which his noble
intellect gave him, to look abroad over them all with the ken of an almost superhuman
intelligence, he yet dwelt amidst them all “a man forbid;”—self-exiled from
that social intercourse which he was born to brighten and to love; rejected and reviled by
his own heart and affections; dreaded, and therefore hated, by his foes; feared, and
therefore not loved, even by his (so called) “friends:”—with such a man, so
constituted and so circumstanced, there could exist no reciprocity of personal ![]()
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sentiment, no fair interchange of affection, and, therefore, no true
friendship. So that (recurring to the immediate occasion of the foregoing remarks) I
repeat, these Recollections must not be received as the blind tribute of an overweening
affection, seeking to defend from obloquy a sort of other self; but, as a free-will
offering, urged by a sense of justice towards a man whose errors and weakness have been
“monstered” into the attributes of a demon; while his many rare and excellent
qualities—his noble simplicity of heart and mind—his irrepressible love of truth and
justice—and his almost sublime hatred of that oppression and wrong which a systematic
violation of those had so long spread abroad over human hopes and institutions throughout
the world: all these were overlooked or disregarded, or, when not so, were held up to the
world as their direct opposites—as themes for obloquy, rather than claims to admiration.
James Burney (1750-1821)
The brother of Fanny Burney; he sailed with Captain Cook and wrote about his voyages, and
in later life was a friend of Charles Lamb and other literary people.
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.
Charles Lamb [Elia] (1775-1834)
English essayist and boyhood friend of Coleridge at Christ's Hospital; author of
Essays of Elia published in the
London
Magazine (collected 1823, 1833) and other works.
Basil Montagu (1770-1851)
An illegitimate son of the fourth earl of Sandwich, he was educated at Charterhouse and
Christ's College, Cambridge, and afterwards was a lawyer, editor, and friend of Samuel
Romilly, William Godwin, and William Wordsworth.
John Scott (1784-1821)
After Marischal College he worked as a journalist with Leigh Hunt, edited
The Champion (1814-1817), and edited the
London
Magazine (1820) until he was killed in the duel at Chalk Farm.
The Champion. (1814-22). A Sunday London newspaper edited by John Scott (1784-1821); John Thelwall (1764-1834) was
proprietor and editor from 1818.
