The essays of virginia w.., p.19
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, page 19
Thus solicited, Fanny arrived some time in July, 1773, and for almost two months lodged in the boxroom – the other rooms were so littered with dogs and poultry that they had to put her in the boxroom – and observed the humours of Tingmouth society and the moods of the lovers. There could be no doubt thatfnee they were still very much in love, but the truth was that Tingmouth was very gay. A great many families made it their summer resort; there were the Phippses and the Hurrels and the Westerns and the Colbournes; there was Mr Crispen – perhaps the most distinguished man in Tingmouth – Mr Green who lodged with Mr Crispen and Miss Bowdler.fnff Naturally, in so small a place, everybody knew everybody. The Phippses, the Hurrels, the Rishtons, the Colbournes, Mr Crispen, Mr Green and Miss Bowdler must meet incessantly. They must make up parties to go to the wrestling matches, and attend the races in their whiskeys,fn30 and see the country people run after a pig whose tail had been cut off. Much coming and going wasfngg inevitable; but, as Fanny soon observed, it was not altogether to Martin’s liking. ‘They will soon make this as errant a public place as Bristol Hotwells or any other place,’fn31 he grumbled. He had nothing whatever to say against the Phippses or the Westerns; he had the greatest respect for the Hurrels, which was odd, considering how very fat and greedy Mr Hurrel was; Mrfnhh Crispen, of course, who lived at Bath and spoke Italian perfectly, one must respect; but the fact was, Martin confided to Fanny, that he ‘almost detested’fn32 Miss Bowdler. Miss Bowdler came of a respectable family. Her brother was destined to edit Shakespeare.fn33 Her family were old friends of the Allens. One could not forbid her thefnii house; in fact she was always in and out of it; and yet, said Martin, ‘he could not endure even the sight of her.’ ‘A woman,’ said Martin, ‘who despises the customs and manners of the country she lives in, must, consequently, conduct herself with impropriety.’fn34 And, indeed, she did. For though she was only twenty-six she had come to Tingmouth alone; and then she made no secret of the fact, indeed she avowed it quite openly ‘in the fair face of day,’fn35 that she visited Mr Crispen in his lodgings, and not merely paid a call but stayed to supper. Nobody had ‘the most distant shadow of doubt of Miss Bowdler’s being equally innocent with those who have more worldly prudence,’fn36 but at the same time nobody could doubt that Miss Bowdler found the society of gentlemen more entertaining than that of ladies – or could deny that though Mr Crispen was old, Mr Green who lodged with him was young. Then, of course, shefnjj came on to the Rishtons and encouraged Maria in her least desirable attribute – her levity, her love of chaff, her carelessness of dress and deportment. It was deplorable.
Fanny Burney liked Martin very much and listened to his complaints with sympathy; but for all her charm and distinction, indeed because of them, she was destined unfortunately to make matters worse. Among her gifts she had the art of being extremely attractive to elderly gentlemen. Soon Mr Crispen was paying her outrageous attentions. ‘Little Burney’fn37 he said was irresistible; the name of Burney would be found – with many others, Miss Bowdler interjected – cut upon his heart. Mr Crispen must implore one kiss. It was said of course in jest, but Miss Bowdler took it of course infnkk earnest. Had she not nursed Mr Crispen through a dangerous illness? Had she not sacrificed her maidenly reputation by visiting him in his cottage? And then Martin, who had been perhaps already annoyed by Mr Crispen’s social predominance, found it galling in the extreme to have that gentleman always in the house, always paying outrageous compliments to his guest. Anything that ‘led towards flirtation’fn38 he disliked; and soon Mr Crispen had become, Fanny observed, almost as odiousfn39 as Miss Bowdler. He threw himself into the study of Italianfnll grammar; he read aloud to Maria and Fanny from the Faery Queen, ‘omitting whatever, to the poet’s great disgrace, has crept in that is improper for a woman’s ear.’fn40 But what with Miss Bowdler, Mr Crispen, the Tingmothians and the influence of undesirable acquaintances upon his wife, there can be no doubt that Martin was very uncomfortable at Tingmouth, and when the time came, on September 17, to say good-bye he appeared ‘in monstrous spirits.’fn41 Perhaps everybody was glad that the summer was at an end. They were glad to say good-bye and glad to be able to say it in civil terms. Mr Crispen left for Bath; and Miss Bowdler – there is no rashness in the assumption – left, for Bath also.
The Rishtons proceeded in their whiskey with all their dogs left tofnmm visit the Westerns, one of the few families with whom Martin cared to associate. But the journey was unfortunate. They began by taking the wrong turning, then they ran over Tingmouth, the Newfoundland dog, who was running under the body of the whiskey. Then at Oxford Maria longed to see the colleges, but feeling sure that Martin’s pride would be hurt at showing himself in a whiskey with a wife where in the old days he had ‘shone forth a gay bachelor with a phaeton and four bays,’fn42 she refused his offer to take her, and had her hair dressed, very badly, instead. Off they went again, and again they ran over two more dogs. Worst of all, when they arrived at the Westerns’ theyfnnn found the whole house shut up and the Westerns gone to Buckinghamshire. Altogether it was an unfortunate expedition. And it is impossible, as one reads Maria’s breathless volubility to Fanny, to resist the conviction that the journey with its accidents and mistakes, with its troop of dogs, and Martin’s pride, and Maria’s fears and her recourse to the hairdresser and the hairdresser’s ill success, and Martin’s memories of gay bachelor days and phaetons and bay horses and his respect for the Westerns and his love of servants was typical of the obscure years of married life that were now to succeed each other at Stanhoe, in Norfolk.
At Stanhoe they lived the livesfnoo of country gentry. They repaired the ancient house, though they had but the lease of it. They planted and cleaned and cut new walks in the garden. They bought a cow and started a dairy for Maria. Dog was added to dog – rare dogs, wonderful dogs, spaniels, lurchers, Portugalfnpp pointers from the banks of the Dowrow. To keep up the establishment as establishments should be kept up, nine servants, in Martin’s opinion, were none too many. And so, though she had no children, Maria found that all her time was occupied with her household and the care of her establishment. But how far better, she wrote, to be active like this instead of leading ‘the loitering life’ she had led at Tingmouth! Surely, Maria continued, scribbling her heart out ungrammatically to Fanny Burney, ‘there are pleasures for every station and employment,’ and one cannot be bored if ‘as I hope I am acting properly’;fn43 so that in sober truth she did not envy Fanny Lord Stanhope’s fête champêtre, since she had her chickens and her dairy, and Tingmouth, who had had the distemper, mustfnqq be led out on a string. Why, then, regret Miss Bowdler and Mr Crispen and the sport and gaiety of the old days at Tingmouth? Nevertheless, the old days keptfnrr coming back to her mind. At Tingmouth, she reflected, they had only kept a man and a maid. Here they had nine servants, and the more there are the more ‘cabally and insolent’fn44 they become. And then relations come over from Lynn and pried into her kitchen and made her more ‘bashful,’fn45 as Martin would say, than ever. And then if she sat down to her tambour for half an hour Martin, ‘who is I believe the Most Active Creature alive,’fn46 would burst in and say, ‘Come Maria, you must go with me and see how charmingly Damon hunts’ – or he would say ‘I know of a pheasant’s nest about two miles off, you shall go and see it.’fn47
Then away we trail broiling over Cornfields – and when we come to the pit some Unlucky boy has Stole the Eggs … then I spend Whole Mornings seeing him Shoot Rooks – grub up trees – and at night for we never come in now till Nine o’clock – when tea is over and I have settled my accounts or done some company business – bed-time Comes.fn48
Bedtime had come; and the day had been somehow disappointing.fnss
How could she mend matters? How could she save money so that Martin could buy the phaeton upon which his heart had been set ever since they were married? She might save on dress, for she did not mind what she wore; but alas! Martin was very particular still; he did not like her to dress in linen. So she must manage better in the house, and she was not formed to manage servants. Thus shefntt began to dwell upon those happy days before she had gone to Tingmouth, before she had married, before she had nine servants and a phaeton and ever so many dogs. She began to brood over that still more distant time when she had first known the Burneys and they had sat ‘browsing over my little [fire] and eating good things out of the closet by the fire side.’fn49 Her thoughts turned to all those friends whom she had lost, to that ‘lovd society which I remember with the greatest pleasure’;fn50 and she could never forget in particular the paternal kindness of Dr Burney. Oh, she sighed as she sat alone in Norfolk among the pheasants and the fields, how she wished that ‘none of my family had ever quitted his sheltering roof till placed under the protection of a worthy husband.’fn51 For her own marriage – but enough; they had been very much in love; they had been very happy; she must go and do her hair; she must try to please her Rishy. And so the obscure history of the Rishtons fades away, save what is preserved by the sprightly pen of Maria’s half-sisterfnuu in the pages of Evelina. And yet – the reflection will occur – if Fanny had seen more of Maria, and more of Mr Crispen and even more of Miss Bowdler and the Tingmouth set, her later books, had they been less refined, might have been as amusing as her first.
Wm. Hazlitt, the Manfn1
Had one met Hazlitt no doubt one would have liked him on his own principle that ‘We can scarcely hate anyone we know.’fn2 But Hazlitt has been dead now a hundred years and it is perhaps a question how far we can know him well enough to overcome those feelings of dislike which his writings still so sharply arouse. For Hazlitt – it is one of his prime merits – was not one of those noncommittal writers who shuffle off in a mist and die of their own insignificance. His essays are emphatically himself. He has no reticence and he has no shame. He tells us exactly what he thinks, and he tells us – the confidence is less seductive – exactly what he feels.
As of all men he had the most intense consciousness of his own existence, since never a day passed without inflicting on him some pang of hate or jealousy, some thrill of anger or pleasure, we cannot read him for long without coming in contact with a very singular character – ill-conditioned yet high-minded; mean yet noble; intensely egotistical yet inspired by the most genuine passion for the rights and liberties of mankind. Soon, so thin is the veil of the essay, his very person comes before us. We see him ‘brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange.’fn3 He comes shuffling into the room, looking nobody straight in the face, shaking hands as with the fin of a fish.fn4 ‘His manners are 99 in 100 singularly repulsive,’fn5 Coleridge said. Yet now and again his face lit up with intellectual beauty and his manner lost its asperity and became sympathetic and even tender.
Soon, too, as we read on we become familiar with the whole gamut of his grievances. He lived, one gathers, mostly at inns. No woman’s form graced his board. He had quarrelled with all his old friends, save perhaps with Lamb.fn6 Yet his only fault had been that he had stuck to his principles and ‘not become a government tool.’fn7 He was the object of malignant persecution – Blackwood’s reviewers called him ‘pimply Hazlitt,’fn8 though it was a lie. These lies, however, got into print and then he was afraid to visit his friends because the footman had read the newspaper and the housemaid was tittering at him behind his back. He had – no one could deny it – one of the finest minds and he wrote indisputably the best prose of his times. But what did that avail with women? Fine ladies have no respect for scholars nor chambermaids either – so the growl and plaint of his own grievances keeps breaking through, and yet there is something so independent, subtle, fine and enthusiastic about him that dislike crumbles and turns to something much warmer and more complex. Hazlitt was right: ‘It is the mask only that we dread and hate; the man may have something human about him! The notions, in short, which we entertain of people at a distance or from partial representation, or from guess-work, are simple, uncompounded ideas, which answer to nothing in reality; those which we derive from experience are mixed modes, the only true and, in general, the most favourable ones.’fn9
Certainly our ideas about Hazlitt are neither simple nor uncompounded. From the first he was a two-minded man – one of those divided natures who are inclined almost equally to two quite opposite careers.
His original impulse was not to essay writing but to painting and philosophy. There was something in the remote and quiet art of the painter that offered a refuge to his tormented spirit. He noted enviously how happy the old age of painters was – ‘their minds keep alive to the last;’fn10 he turned longingly to the calling that takes one out of doors, among trees and woods, that deals with bright pigments and has solid brush and canvas for its tools and not immaterial ink and paper. Yet at the same time he was bitten by an abstract curiosity that would not let him rest in the contemplation of concrete beauty. When he was a boy of fourteen he heard his father, the good Unitarian minister, dispute with an old lady of the congregation as they were coming out of meeting as to the limits of religious toleration, and ‘it was this circumstance,’ he said, ‘that decided the fate of my future life.’ It set him off ‘forming in my head … the following system of political rights and general jurisprudence.’ He became aware that he must be ‘satisfied for the reason of things.’fn11
The two ideals were ever after to clash. To be a thinker and to express in the plainest and most accurate of terms ‘the reason for things,’ and to be a painter gloating over blues and crimsons, breathing fresh air and living sensually in the emotions – these were two different, perhaps incompatible ideals, yet like all Hazlitt’s emotions both were tough and each strove for mastery. He yielded now to one, now to the other. He spent months in Paris copying pictures at the Louvre. He came home and toiled laboriously at the portrait of an old woman in a bonnet day after day, seeking conscientiously to discover the secret of Rembrandt’sfn12 genius; but he lacked some quality – perhaps it was invention – and in the end cut the canvas to ribbons in a rage or turned it against the wall in despair. At the same time he was writing that ‘Essay Upon the Principles of Human Actions’fn13 which he preferred to all his other works. For there he wrote plainly and truthfully, without glitter or garishness, without any wish to please or to make money, but solely to gratify the urgency of his own desire for truth. Naturally ‘the book dropped still-born from the press.’fn14 At the same time his political hopes, his belief that the age of freedom had come and that the tyranny of kingship was over had proved vain. His friends went over to the government and he was left alone to uphold the doctrines of liberty, fraternity and revolution.
Thus he was a man of divided tastes and of thwarted ambition; a man whose happiness, even in early life, lay behind. His mind had set young and bore forever the stamp of first impressions. In his happiest moods he looked not forward but backward – to the garden where he played as a child, to the blue hills of Shropshirefn15 and to all those landscapes which he had seen when hope was still his, and peace brooded upon him and he looked up from his painting or his book and saw the fields and woods as if they were the outward expression of his own inner quietude. It is to the books that he read then that he returns – to Rousseau and to Burke and to the Letters of Junius.fn16 The impression that they made upon his youthful imagination was never effaced and scarcely overlaid, for after youth was over he ceased to read for pleasure, as in maturity he seldom read a book through; and writing was done generally at the last moment, against the grain.
But write he must. Very soon life became a matter of compromise – the pure and intense pleasures of youth had to undergo adulteration. He who was always so susceptible to the softer graces of the other sex, and at the same time so uncomfortably aware of his own lack of attraction, met Miss Sarah Stoddartfn17 and was charmed, not by her face, which was plain, nor by her dress, which was garish, but by her ability and independence. She pleased him when he met her at the Lambs by the common sense with which she found the kettle and boiled it when Mary absent-mindedly delayed. But of domestic talents she had none.
They married. Children were born and children died, and it became necessary to give up country life and unprofitable brooding over abstract questions in order to earn a living. Instead of spending eight years in writing eight pages he must become a journalist and deliver up articles of the right length at the right moment. His ability and his success in his new calling were great. Soon the mantelpiece of the old house in York Street where Milton had lived was scribbled over with ideas for essays.fn18 As the habit proves, the house was not a tidy house, nor did geniality and comfort excuse the lack of method. The Hazlitts were to be found eating breakfast at two in the afternoon without a fire in the grate or curtains in the window.
A stalwart walker, a clever and clear-sighted woman, Mrs Hazlitt had no delusions about her husband. He was unfaithful to her, and she knew it. But also ‘He said I had always despised him and his abilities,’fn19 she noted in her diary, and at length the prosaic marriage came lamely to an end. After that Hazlitt lived mainly in the parlours of the inns. There he made love to the innkeepers’ daughters; there he suffered tortures of humiliation and deceit; but there, too, as he drank cup after cup of very strong tea, he wrote essay after essay, and Hazlitt’s essays, of course, are among the best we have.
That they are not quite the best – that they do not haunt the mind as the essays of Montaigne, or Lamb or Baconfn20 haunt the mind is also true. He seldom reaches the perfection of those great writers or their unity. There is always something divided and discordant even in his finest work, as if two minds were in harness, who never succeed save for a few splendid moments in keeping in step together.
The two minds can be distinguished. In the first place there is the mind of the thinker. It is the thinker for the most part who is allowed the choice of the subject. He chooses some abstract idea, like envy, or egotism, or reason and imagination. He treats it with energy and independence. He explores its ramifications and scales its narrow paths as if it were a mountain road and the ascent both difficult and inspiring. Compared with this athletic progress, Lamb’s seems to be the flight of a butterfly cruising capriciously among the flowers and perching for a second incongruously here upon a barn, there upon a wheelbarrow. Every sentence in Hazlitt carries us forward. He has his end in view and strides towards it with that straight and apparently effortless action in that ‘pure conversational prose style,’fn21 which is so much more difficult to learn than fine writing. There can be no question that Hazlitt the thinker is admirable. He is strong and fearless; he knows what he wants to say and he says it forcibly, yet brilliantly, too, for the readers of newspapers are a dull-eyed race who must be dazzled in order to make them see.
