William
Hazlitt, the son of an Irish Unitarian
clergyman, was born in Maidstone, Kent, on 10th April, 1778. His father
was a friend of Joseph Priestley and
Richard Price. As a result of supporting
the American Revolution, Rev. Hazlitt and his family were forced to
leave Kent and live in Ireland.
The
family returned to England in 1787 and settled at Wem in Shropshire.
At the age of fifteen William was sent to be trained for the ministry
at New Unitarian College at Hackney in London.
The college had been founded by Joseph Priestley
and had a reputation for producing freethinkers. In 1797 Hazlitt lost
his desire to become a Unitarian minister and left the college.
While in London Hazlitt became friends
with a group of writers with radical political ideas. The group included
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William
Wordsworth, Thomas Barnes, Henry
Brougham, Leigh Hunt, Robert
Southey and Lord Byron. At first Hazlitt
attempted to become a portrait painter but after a lack of success
he turned to writing.
Charles
Lamb introduced Hazlitt to William Godwin
and other important literary figures in London.
In 1805 Joseph Johnson published Hazlitt's first book, An
Essay on the Principles of Human Action. The following
year Hazlitt published Free Thoughts on Public
Affairs, an attack on William Pitt
and his government's foreign policy. Hazlitt opposed England's war
with France and its consequent heavy taxation.
This was followed by a series of articles and pamphlets on political
corruption and the need to reform the voting system.
Hazlitt
began writing for The Times and in
1808 married the editor's sister, Sarah Stoddart. His friend, Thomas
Barnes, was the newspaper's parliamentary reporter. Later, Barnes
was to become the editor of the newspaper. In 1810 he published the
New and Improved Grammar of the English
Language.
In 1813 Hazlitt was employed as the parliamentary reporter for the
Morning Chronicle, the country's
leading Whig newspaper. However, in his articles,
Hazlitt criticized all political parties. Hazlitt also contributed
to The Examiner, a radical journal
edited by Leigh Hunt. Later,
Hazlitt wrote for the Edinburgh Review,
the Yellow Dwarf and the London
Magazine. In these journals Hazlitt produced a series of
essays on art, drama, literature and politics. During this period
he established himself as England's leading expert on the writings
of William
Shakespeare.
Hazlitt wrote several books on literature including Characters
of Shakespeare (1817), A View
of the English Stage (1818), English
Poets (1818) and English Comic
Writers (1819). In these books he urged the artist to be
aware of his social and political responsibilities.
Hazlitt
continued to write on about politics and his most important books
on this subject is Political Essays with
Sketches of Public Characters (1819). In the book Hazlitt
explains how the admiration of power turns many writers into "intellectual
pimps and hirelings of the press."
Hazlitt's
marriage to Sarah ended in 1823 as a result of an affair with a maid,
Sarah Walker. Hazlitt wrote an account of this relationship in his
book Liber Amoris. In 1824 Hazlitt
married Isabella Bridgewater but this relationship only lasted a year.
In the
The Spirit of the Age: Contemporary Portraits (1825) Hazlitt
provides a series of contemporary portraits including
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth,
Robert Southey, William
Cobbett,
William Godwin and William
Wilberforce. This was followed by The
Plain Speaker (1826) and
Life of Napoleon (4 volumes, 1828-30).
William Hazlitt died in poverty of stomach cancer on 18th September
1830.
(1)
William Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819)
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the
love of ourselves.
(2)
William Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819)
It is not easy to write a familiar style. Many people mistake a familiar
for a vulgar style, and suppose that to write without affectation
is to write at random. On the contrary, there is nothing that requires
more precision, and, if I may so say, purity of expression, than the
style I am speaking of. It utterly rejects not only all unmeaning
pomp, but all low, cant phrases, and loose, unconnected, slipshod
allusions. It is not to take the first word that offers, but the best
word in common use; it is not to throw words together in any combinations
we please, but to follow and avail ourselves of the true idiom of
the language.
To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as
anyone would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command
and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and
perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic, and oratorical flourishes.
Or, to give another illustration, to write naturally is the same thing
in regard to common conversation as to read naturally is in regard
to common speech.
It does not follow that it is an easy thing to give the true accent
and inflection to the words you utter, because you do not attempt
to rise above the level of ordinary life and colloquial speaking.
You do not assume, indeed, the solemnity of the pulpit, or the tone
of stage-declamation; neither are you at liberty to gabble on at a
venture, without emphasis or discretion, or to resort to vulgar dialect
or clownish pronunciation. You must steer a middle course. You are
tied down to a given and appropriate articulation, which is determined
by the habitual associations between sense and sound, and which you
can only hit by entering into the author's meaning as you must find
the proper words and style to express yourself by fixing your thoughts
on the subject you have to write about.
Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get
upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety
and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect
a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want
to express: it is not so to pitch upon the very word that exactly
fits it out of eight or 10 words equally common, equally intelligible,
with nearly equal pretensions, it is a matter of some nicety and discrimination
to pick out the very one the preferableness of which is scarcely perceptible,
but decisive. A word may be a fine-sounding word, of an unusual length,
and very imposing from its learning and novelty, and yet in the connection
in which it is introduced may be quite pointless and irrelevant.
It is not pomp or pretension, but the adaptation of the expression
to the idea, that clenches a writer's meaning: - as it is not the
size or glossiness of the materials, but their being fitted each to
its place, that gives strength to the arch; or as the pegs and nails
are as necessary to the support of the building as the larger timbers,
and more so than the mere showy, unsubstantial ornaments. The florid
style is the reverse of the familiar. The last is employed as an unvarnished
medium to convey ideas; the first is resorted to as a spangled veil
to conceal the want of them. Rouge high enough, and never mind the
natural complexion. The vulgar, who are not in the secret, will admire
the look of preternatural health and vigour; and the fashionable,
who regard only appearances, will be delighted with the imposition.
Keep to your sounding generalities, your tinkling phrases, and all
will be well. Swell out an unmeaning truism to a perfect tympany of
style. A thought, a distinction is the rock on which all this brittle
cargo of verbiage splits at once.
Such writers have merely verbal imaginations, that retain nothing
but words. Nothing more is meant by them than meets the ear: they
understand or mean nothing more than meets their eye. The web and
texture of the universe, and of the heart of man, is a mystery to
them: they have no faculty that strikes a chord in unison with it.
They cannot get beyond the daubings of fancy, the varnish of sentiment.
Objects are not linked to feelings, words to things, but images revolve
in splendid mockery, words represent themselves in their strange rhapsodies.
With a sovereign contempt for what is familiar and natural, they are
the slaves of vulgar affectation - of a routine of high-flown phrases.
Scorning to imitate realities, they are unable to invent anything,
to strike one original idea. They are not copyists of nature, it is
true; but they are the poorest of all plagiarists, the plagiarists
of words.
(3)
William Hazlitt, On Prejudice (1821)
We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner
of doing it.
(4)
William Hazlitt, Pomp and Ignorance (1823)
The Spirit of Monarchy is nothing but the craving in the human mind
after the sensible and the One. It is not so much a matter of state-necessity
or policy, as a natural infirmity, a disease, a false appetite in
the popular feeling, which must be gratified. Man is an individual
animal with narrow faculties, but infinite desires, which he is anxious
to concentrate in some one object within the grasp of his imagination,
and where, if he cannot be all that he wishes himself, he may at least
contemplate his own pride, vanity, and passions, displayed in their
most extravagant dimensions in a being no bigger and no better than
himself.
Man is
a poetical animal, and delights in fiction. We make kings of men,
and gods of stocks and stones: we are not jealous of the creatures
of our own hands. We only want a peg or loop to hang our idle fancies
on, a puppet to dress up, a lay-figure to paint from. We ask only
for the stage effect; we do not go behind the scenes, or it would
go hard with many of our prejudices. We see the symbols of majesty,
we enjoy the pomp, we crouch before the power, we walk in the procession,
and make part of the pageant, and we say in our secret hearts: there
is nothing but accident that prevents us from being at the head of
it.
From the
most absolute despot to the lowest slave there is but one step (no,
not one) in point of real merit. As far as truth or reason is concerned,
they might change situations tomorrow - they constantly do so without
the smallest loss of benefit to mankind. Tyranny, in a word, is a
farce got up for the entertainment of poor human nature; and it might
pass very well, if it did not so often turn into a tragedy.
The world
has been doing little else but playing at make-believe all its lifetime.
For several thousand years its chief rage was to paint large pieces
of wood and smear them with gore and call them gods and offer victims
to them - slaughtered hecatombs, the fat of goats and oxen, or human
sacrifices - showing its love of show, of cruelty, and imposture;
and woe to him who should peep through the blanket of the dark to
cry: hold, hold.
The game
was carried on through all the first ages of the world, and is still
kept up in many parts of it; and it is impossible to describe the
wars, massacres, horrors, miseries, and crimes, to which it gave colour,
sanctity, and sway. At length, reason prevailed over imagination so
far, that these brute idols and their altars were overturned: it was
thought too much to set up stocks and stones, golden calves and brazen
serpents as bona fide gods and goddesses, which men were to fall down
and worship at their peril.
It was
thought a bold stride to divert the course of our imaginations, the
overflowings of our enthusiasms, our love of the mighty and the marvellous,
from the dead to the living subject, and there we stick. We have got
living idols, instead of dead ones; and we fancy that they are real,
and put faith in them accordingly. We take a child from his birth
and we agree, when he grows up to be a man, to heap the highest honours
of the state upon him and to pay the most devoted homage to his will.
Is there
anything in the person, any mark, any likelihood, to warrant this
sovereign awe and dread? No: he may be little better than an idiot,
little short of a madman, and yet he is no less qualified for king.
Can we make any given individual taller or stronger or wiser than
other men, or different from what nature intended him to be? No; but
we can make a king of him. We cannot add a cubit to the stature, or
instill a virtue into the minds of monarchs - but we can put a sceptre
into their hands, a crown upon their heads, we can set them on an
eminence, we can surround them with circumstance, we can aggrandize
them with power, we can pamper their appetites, we can pander to their
wills. We can do everything to exalt them in external rank and station
- nothing to lift them one step higher in the scale of moral or intellectual
excellence.
(5)
In his book The Sprit of the Age, published in 1825, William
Hazlitt included an attack on Lord Eldon, the government's Lord Chancellor.
On all the great questions that have divided party opinion or agitated
the public mind, the Chancellor has been found uniformly and without
a single exception on the side of prerogative and power, and against
every proposal for the advancement of freedom. He was a strenuous
supporter of the wars and coalitions against the principles of liberty
abroad; he has been equally zealous in urging or defending every act
and infringement of the Constitution for abridging it at home. He
has studiously set his face against Catholic emancipation; he laboured
hard in his vocation to prevent the abolition of the Slave Trade.
He signs a warrant in Council, devoting ten thousand men to an untimely
death with steady nerves. Is it that he is cruel and unfeeling? No;
but he thinks neither of their sufferings nor their cries; he sees
only the gracious smile, the ready hand stretched out to thank him
for his compliance with the dictates of rooted hate. The King's hand
is velvet to the touch; the Woolsack is a seat of honour and profit.
That is all he knows about the matter.
(6)
William Hazlitt was criticized by the Tory
press throughout his career. He retaliated by attacking The
Quarterly Review in his book The Spirit of the Age,
published in 1825.
The editor and his friends systematically explode every principle
of liberty and strike at the root of all free inquiry or discussion
by running down every writer as a vile scribbler and a bad member
of society, who is not a hireling and a slave. The intention is to
poison the sources of public opinion and of individual fame, to pervert
literature from being the natural ally of freedom and humanity into
an engine of priestcraft and despotism, and to undermine the spirit
of the English constitution and the independence of the English character.
(7)
Tom Paulin, The
Guardian (5th April, 2003)
A master of English prose
style, a beautifully modulated general essayist, the first great theatre
critic in English, the first great art critic, a magnificent political
journalist and polemicist like William Cobbett, whom he met and whom
he describes affectionately in The Spirit of the Age, his greatest
book, Hazlitt is both a philosopher and one of the supreme literary
critics in the language.
He is the critic as artist,
to use Wilde's phrase, because he makes critical prose into imaginative
action, so that the critic is redeemed from being simply the servant
of the poet, the novelist, the playwright.
Available from Amazon
Books (order below)
