Naturally, given his susceptibility to the charms of the other sex, he married; and naturally, given his consciousness of his own ‘misshapen form made to be mocked’,fn3 he married unhappily.fni Miss Sarah Stoddart pleased him when he met her at the Lambs’ by the commonsense with which she found the kettle and boiled it when Mary absent-mindedly delayed. But of domestic talents she had none. Her little income was insufficient to meet the burden of married life, and Hazlitt soon found that instead of spending eight years in writing eight pages he must turn journalist and write articles upon politics and plays and pictures and books of the right length, at the right moment. Soon the mantelpiece of the old house at York Street where Milton had lived was scribbled over with ideas for essays. As the habit proves, the house was not a tidy house, nor did geniality and comfort excuse the lack of order. The Hazlitts were to be found eating breakfast at two in the afternoon, without a fire in the grate or a curtain to the window. A valiant walker and a clear-sighted woman, Mrs Hazlitt had no delusions about her husband. He was not faithful to her, and she faced the fact with admirable commonsense. But ‘he said that I had always despised him and his abilities’, she noted in her diary, and that was carrying commonsense too far. The prosaic marriage came lamely to an end. Free at last from the encumbrance of home and husband, Sarah Hazlitt pulled on her boots and set off on a walking tour through Scotland, while Hazlitt, incapable of attachment or comfort, wandered from inn to inn, suffered tortures of humiliation and disillusionment, but, as he drank cup after cup of very strong tea and made love to the innkeeper’s daughter, he wrote those essays that are of course among the very best that wefnj have.

  That they are not quite the best – that they do not haunt the mind and remain entire in the memory as the essays of Montaigne or Lamb haunt the mind – is also true. He seldom reaches the perfection of these great writers or their unity. Perhaps it is the nature of these short pieces that they need unity and a mind at harmony with itself. A little jar there makes the whole composition tremble. The essays of Montaigne, Lamb, even Addison,fn4 have the reticence which springs from composure, for with all their familiarity they never tell us what they wish to keep hidden. But with Hazlitt it is different. There is always something divided and discordant even in his finest essays, as if two minds were at work who never succeed save for a few moments in making a match of it. In the first place there is the mind of the inquiring boy who wishes to be satisfied of the reason of things – 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 the flight of a butterfly cruising capriciously among the flowers and perching for a second incongruously here upon a barn, there upon a wheelbarrow. But everyfnk sentence in Hazlitt carries us forward. He has his end in view and, unless some accident intervenes, he strides towards it in that ‘pure conversational prose style’ which, as he points out, is so much more difficult to practisefnl than fine writing.

  There can be no question that Hazlitt the thinker is an admirable companion. He is strong and fearless; he knows his mind and he speaks his mind forcibly yet brilliantly too, for the readers of newspapers are a dull-eyed race who must be dazzled in order to make them see. But besides Hazlitt the thinker there is Hazlitt the artist. There is the sensuous and emotional man, with his feeling for colour and touch, with his passion for prize-fighting and Sarah Walker,fn5 with his sensibility to all those emotions which disturb the reason and make it often seem futile enough to spend one’s time slicing things up finer and finer with the intellect when the body of the world is so firm and so warm and demands so imperatively to be pressedfnm to the heart. To know the reason of things is a poor substitute for being able to feel them. And Hazlitt felt with the intensity of a poet. The most abstract of his essays will suddenly glow red-hot or white-hotfnn if something reminds him of his past. He will drop his fine analytic pen and paint a phrase or two with a full brush brilliantly and beautifully if some landscape stirs his imagination or some book brings back the hour when he first read it. The famous passages about reading Love for Love and drinking coffee from a silver pot, and reading La Nouvelle Héloïse and eating a cold chicken, are known to all,fn6 and yet how oddly they often break into the context, how violently we are switched from reason to rhapsody – how embarrassingly our austere thinker falls upon our shoulders and demands our sympathy! It is this disparity and the sense of two forces in conflict that trouble the serenity and cause the inconclusiveness of some of Hazlitt’s finest essays. They set out to give us a proof and they end by giving us a picture. We are about to plant our feet upon the solid rock of Q.E.D., and behold the rock turnsfno to quagmire and we are knee-deep in mud and water and flowers. ‘Faces pale as the primrose with hyacinthine locks’ are in our eyes; the woods of Tuderly breathe their mystic voices in our ears. Then suddenly we are recalled, and the thinker, austere, muscular, and sardonic,fnp leads us on to analyse, to dissect, and to condemn.

  Thus if we compare Hazlitt with the other great masters in his line it is easy to see where his limitations lie. His range is narrow and his sympathies few if intense.fnq He does not open the doors wide upon all experience like Montaigne, rejecting nothing, tolerating everything, and watching the play of the soul with irony and detachment. On the contrary, his mind shut hard with egotistic tenacity upon his first impressions and froze them to unalterable convictions. Nor was it for him to make play, like Lamb, with the figures of his friends, creatingfnr them afresh in fantastic flights of imagination and reverie. His characters are seen with the same quickfns sidelong glance full of shrewdness and suspicion which he darted upon people in the flesh. He does not use the essayist’s licence to circle and meander. He is tethered by his egotism and by his convictions to one time and one place and one being. We never forget that this is England in the early days of the nineteenth century; indeed, we feel ourselves in the Southampton Buildings or in the inn parlour that looks over the downs and on to the high road at Winterslow. He has an extraordinary power of making us contemporary with himself. But as we read on through the many volumes which he filled with so much energy and yet with so little love of his task, the comparison with the other essayists drops from us. These are not essays, it seems independentfnt and self-sufficient, but fragments broken off from some larger book – some searching enquiry into the reason for human actions or into the nature of human institutions. It is only accident that has cut them short, and only deference to the public taste that has decked them out with gaudy images andfnu bright colours. The phrase which occurs in one form or another so frequently and indicates the structure which if he were free he would followfnv – ‘I will here try to go more at large into the subject and then give such instances and illustrations of it as occur to me’fn7 – could by no possibility occurfnw in the Essays of Elia or Sir Roger de Coverley.fn8 He loves to grope among the curious depths of human psychology and to track down the reason of things. He excels in hunting out the obscure causes that lie behind some common saying or sensation, and the drawers of his mind are well stocked with illustrations and arguments. We can believe him when he says that for twenty years he had thought hard and suffered acutely. He is speaking of what he knows from experience when he exclaims, ‘How many ideas and trains of sentiment, long and deep and intense, often pass through the mind in only one day’s thinking or reading!’fn9 Convictions are his life-blood; ideas have formed in him like stalactites, drop by drop, year by year. He has sharpened them in a thousand solitary walks; he has tested themfnx in argument after argument, sitting in his corner, sardonically observant, over a late supper at the Southampton Inn. But he has not changed them. His mind is his own and it is made up.

  Thusfny however threadbare the abstraction – Hot and Cold, or Envy, or The Conduct of Life, or The Picturesque and the Idealfn10 – he has something solid to write about. He never lets his brain slacken or trusts to his great gift of picturesque phrasing to float him over a stretch of shallow thought.fnz Even when it is plain from the savagery and contempt with which he attacks his task that he is out of the mood and only keeps his mind to the grindstone by strong tea and sheerfnaa force of will, we still find him mordant and searching and acute. There is a stir and trouble, a vivacityfnbb and conflict in his essays as if the very contrariety of his gifts kept him on the stretch. He is always hating, loving, thinking, and suffering. He could never come to terms with authority or doff his own idiosyncrasy in deference to opinion. Thus chafed and goaded the level of his essays is extraordinarily high. Often dry, garish in their bright imagery, monotonous in the undeviating energy of their rhythm – for Hazlitt believed too implicitly in his own saying, ‘mediocrity, insipidity, want of character, is the great fault’,fn11 to be an easy writer to read for long at a stretch – there is scarcely an essay withoutfncc its stress of thought, its thrust of insight, its moment of penetration. His pages are full of fine sayings and unexpected turns andfndd independence and originality. ‘All that is worth remembering of life is the poetry of it.’fn12 ‘If the truth were known, the most disagreeable people are the most amiable.’fn13 ‘You will hear more good things on the outside of a stage-coach from London to Oxford, than if you were to pass a twelve-month with the undergraduates or heads of colleges of that famous University.’fn14 We are constantly plucked at by sayings that we would like to put by to examinefnee later.

  But besides the volumes of Hazlitt’s essays there are the volumes of Hazlitt’s criticism. In one way or another, either as lecturer or reviewer, Hazlitt strode through the greater part of English literature and delivered his opinion of the majority of famous books. His criticism has the rapidity and the daring, if it has alsofnff the looseness and the roughness, which arise from the circumstances in which it was written. He must cover a great deal of ground, make his points clear to an audience not of readers but of listeners, and has time only to point to the tallest towers and the brightestfngg pinnacles in the landscape. But even in his most perfunctory criticism of books we feel that faculty for seizing on the important and indicating the main outline which learned critics often lose and timid critics never acquire. He is one of those rare critics who have thought so much that they can dispense with reading. It matters very little that Hazlitt had read only one poem by Donne;fn15 that he found Shakespeare’s sonnets unintelligible; that he never read a book through after he was thirty; that he came indeed to dislike reading altogether. What he had read he had read with fervour. And since in his view it was the duty of a critic to ‘reflect the colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work’,fn16 appetite, gusto, enjoyment were far more important than analytic subtlety or prolonged and extensive study. To communicate his own fervour was his aim. Thus he first cuts out with vigorous and direct strokes the figure of one author and contrasts it with another, and next builds up with the freest use of imagery and colour the brilliant ghost that the book has leftfnhh glimmering in his mind. The poem is re-created in glowing phrases – ‘A rich distilled perfume emanates from it like the breath of genius; a golden cloud envelops it; a honeyed paste of poetic diction encrusts it, like the candied coat of the auricula’.fn17 But since the analyst in Hazlitt is never far from the surface, this painter’s imagery is kept in check by a nervous sense of the hard and lasting in literature, of what a book means and where it should be placed, which models his enthusiasm and gives it angle and outline. He singles out the peculiar quality of his author and stamps it vigorously. There is the ‘deep, internal, sustained sentiment’fn18 of Chaucer; ‘Crabbe is the only poet who has attempted and succeeded in the still life of tragedy’.fn19 There is nothing flabby, weak, orfnii merely ornamental in his criticism of Scott – sense and enthusiasm run hand in hand. And if such criticism is the reverse of final, if it is initiatory and inspiring rather than conclusive and complete, there is something to be said for the critic who starts the reader on a journey and fires him with a phrase to shoot off on adventures of his own.fnjj If one needs an incentive to read Burke, what is better than ‘Burke’s style was forked and playful like the lightning, crested like the serpent’?fn20 Or again, should one be trembling on the brink of a dusty folio, the following passage is enough to plunge one in midstream:

  It is delightful to repose on the wisdom of the ancients; to have some great name at hand, besides one’s own initials always staring one in the face; to travel out of one’s self into the Chaldee, Hebrew, and Egyptian characters; to have the palm-trees waving mystically in the margin of the page, and the camels moving slowly on in the distance of three thousand years. In that dry desert of learning, we gather strength and patience, and a strange and insatiable thirst of knowledge. The ruined monuments of antiquity are also there, and the fragments of buried cities (under which the adder lurks) and cool springs, and green sunny spots, and the whirlwind and the lion’s roar, and the shadow of angelic wings.fn21

  Needless to say that is not criticism. It is sitting in an arm-chair and gazing into the fire, and building up image after image of what one has seen in a book. It is loving and taking the liberties of a lover. It is beingfnkk Hazlitt.

  But it is likely that Hazlitt will survive not in his lectures, nor in his travels, nor in his Life of Napoleon, nor in his Conversations of Northcote,fn22 full as they are of energy and integrity, of broken and fitful splendour and shadowed with the shape of some vast unwritten book that looms on the horizon. He will live in a volume of essays in which is distilled all those powers that are dissipated and distracted elsewhere, where the parts of his complex and tortured spirit come together in a truce of amity and concord. Perhaps a fine day was needed, or a game of fives or a long walk in the country, to bring about this consummation. The body has a large share in everything that Hazlitt writes. Then a mood of intense and spontaneous reverie came over him; he soared into what Patmore called ‘a calm so pure and serene that one did not like to interrupt it’.fn23 His brain worked smoothly and swiftly and without consciousness of its own operations; the pages dropped without an erasure from his pen. Then his mind ranged in a rhapsody of well-being over books and love, over the past and its beauty, the present and its comfort, and the future that would bring a partridge hot from the oven or a dish of sausages sizzling in the pan.

  I look out of my window and see that a shower has just fallen: the fields look green after it, and a rosy cloud hangs over the brow of the hill; a lily expands its petals in the moisture, dressed in its lovely green and white; a shepherd-boy has just brought some pieces of turf with daisies and grass for his young mistress to make a bed for her skylark, not doomed to dip his wings in the dappled dawn – my cloudy thoughts draw off, the storm of angry politics has blown over – Mr. Blackwood, I am yours – Mr. Croker, my service to you – Mr. T. Moore, I am alive and well.fn24

  There is then no division, no discord, no bitterness. The different faculties work in harmony and unity. Sentence follows sentence with the healthy ring and chime of a blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil; the words glow and the sparks fly; gently they fade and the essay is over. And as his writing had such passages of inspired description, so, too, his life had its seasons of intense enjoyment. When he lay dying a hundred years ago in a lodging in Soho his voice rang out with the old pugnacity and conviction: ‘Well, I have had a happy life’. One has only to read him to believe it.fnll

  Geraldine and Janefn1

  Geraldine Jewsbury would certainly not have expected anybody at this time of day to bother themselves about her novels. If she had caught one pulling them down from the shelf in some library she would have expostulated. ‘They’re such nonsense, my dear’, she would have said. And then one likes to fancy that she would have burst out in that irresponsible, unconventional way of hers against libraries and literature and love and life and all the rest of it with a ‘Damn it all!’ or a ‘Confound it!’ for Geraldine was fond of swearing.

  The odd thing about Geraldine Jewsbury, indeed, was the way in which she combined oaths and endearments, sense and effervescence, daring and gush: ‘… defenceless and tender on the one hand, and strong enough to cleave the very rocks on the other’ – that is how Mrs Ireland, her biographer, puts it; or again: ‘Intellectually she was a man, but the heart within her was as womanly as ever daughter of Eve could boast’. Even to look at there was, it would seem, something incongruous, queer, provocative about her. She was very small and yet boyish; very ugly yet attractive. She dressed very well, wore her reddish hair in a net, and ear-rings made in the form of miniature parrots swung in her ears as she talked. There, in the only portrait we have of her, shefna sits reading, with her face half-turned away, defenceless and tender at the moment rather than cleaving the very rocks.

  But what had happened to her before she sat at the photographer’s table reading her book it is impossible to say. Until she was twenty-nine we know nothing of her except that she was born in the year 1812, was the daughter of a merchant, and lived in Manchester, or near it. In the first part of the nineteenth century a woman of twenty-nine was no longer young; she had lived her life or she had missed it. And though Geraldine, with her unconventional ways, was an exception, still it cannot be doubted that something very tremendous had happened in those dim years before we know her. Something had happened in Manchester. An obscure male figure looms in the background – a faithless but fascinating creature who had taught her that life is treacherous, life is hard, life is the very devil for a woman. A dark pool of experience had formed in the back of her mind into which she would dip for the consolation or for the instruction of others. ‘Oh! it is too frightful to talk about. For two years I lived only in short respites from this blackness of darkness’, she exclaimed from time to time. There had been seasons ‘like dreary, calm November days when there is but one cloud, but that one covers the whole heaven’. She had struggled, ‘but struggling is no use’. She had read Cudworth through. She had written an essay upon materialism before giving way. For, though the prey to so many emotions, she was also oddly detached and speculative. She liked to puzzle her head with questions about ‘matter and spirit and the nature of life’ even while her heart was bleeding. Upstairs there was a box full of extracts, abstracts, and conclusions. Yet what conclusion could a woman come to? Did anything avail a woman when love had deserted her, when her lover had played her false? No. It was useless to struggle; one had better let the wave engulf one, the cloud close over one’s head. So she meditated, lying often on a sofa with a piece of knitting in her hands and a green shade over her eyes. For she suffered from a variety of ailments – sore eyes, colds, nameless exhaustion; and Greenheys, the suburb outside Manchester, where she kept house for her brother, was very damp. ‘Dirty, half-melted snow and fog, a swampy meadow, set off by a creeping cold damp’ – that was the view from her window. Often she could hardly drag herself across the room. And then there were incessant interruptions: somebody had come unexpectedly for dinner; she had to jump up and run into the kitchen and cook a fowl with her own hands. That done, she would put on her green shade and peer at her book again, for she was a great reader. She read metaphysics, she read travels, she read old books and new books – and especially the wonderful books of Mr Carlyle.fnb

 

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