1The recent dramatic upturn in William Hazlitt’s critical fortunes— he is increasingly seen as a central figure of the Romantic Age, as well as a refreshing maverick on its malcontent fringe—owes much to a sense that he is, more clearly than his Romantic friends and foes, our contemporary. Where David Bromwich’s groundbreaking study (1983) emphasised the urgency and complexity of his works against the comfortable stereotypes of the late Victorians and Edwardians, more recent critics have tended to turn him into a heroic precursor for our times. Tom Paulin’s Day-Star of Liberty (1998) portrayed Hazlitt as a Dissenting model for all Britons and (Northern) Irishmen trying to escape the conservative orthodoxies of High Modernism, while Duncan Wu’s informative biography (Wu) confidently casts him as “The First Modern Man.” Such ebullience of celebration, it may be noted, stands in marked contrast to the rather starker figure sketched by former commentators, from Virginia Woolf’s “tormented spirit” (Woolf 174)—an embittered idealist further torn apart between his analytic and sensuous selves—to Marilyn Butler’s “unhappy man” and “good hater,” driven into near-solipsism by the failure of the French Revolution (Butler 172).

2It may, to a large extent, be explained by Hazlitt’s appealing position as a Romantic ideologue unwilling to betray his political absolutes for the sake of literary ones, as a lover of poetry and unflinching Republican who could remain faithful to conflicting allegiances through the long night of Legitimacy; and the lasting reaction against Romantic idealism has given extra interest to his notably muscular style, to the unabashed physicality of his writings (“The body has a large share in everything that Hazlitt writes,” Woolf already noted). It also proceeds, one may add, from a perception of Hazlitt as a wary and savvy urbanite, a cutting-edge journalist who could draw on the resources of London radicalism to sharpen his readers’ political wits, just as he could expand and energise contemporary taste by redefining the boundaries between high and low culture—describing Indian jugglers, fives-players and boxing matches with the same gusto as Milton’s sonnets or Poussin’s landscapes. Hazlitt’s “Cockneyism,” first vilified by his Tory enemies at Blackwood’s Magazine, thus becomes a key aspect of his modernity, the mainspring of his excellences, both political and writerly. Paulin, for instance, sees his “decisive, founding style” as dependent on “the intense activities of urban life, on what Algernon Sidney calls ‘turbulent contentious cities’” (52), and even discovers a “New York quality” in his alertness to “the experiential and revelatory value of art” (70); while Gregory Dart, in the introduction to a recent anthology (significantly entitled “Metropolitan Writings”), defines him as a “true Londoner,” “imaginatively seduced by the metropolis,” albeit locating his modernity, in more dialectical fashion, in his “sense of the city as being simultaneously the best and worst place in the world” (2005: x).

3This rehabilitation, indeed, might partly be accounted for by the obvious attractiveness of Hazlitt’s voice and persona—cosmopolitan yet oppositional, dazzling yet with a touch of the Grub Street hack—in the buoyant, driven London of the Millennium years. Yet, as the famous 1823 essay “On Londoners and Country People” makes clear, Hazlitt in his time seems to have been rather a reluctant Cockney, not merely because he often preferred to work in his Wiltshire retreat at Winterslow, [1] but because his attitude towards the metropolis, although seldom analysed per se, was fraught with an ambivalence that is essential to the complexity of his essayistic achievement. Although concluding on a decidedly positive note, Gregory Dart suggests as much when writing that Hazlitt “[describes] the progress of life in terms of a metropolitan dynamic of intoxication and disenchantment” (xviii). It is true that Hazlitt valued life in London because of the endless blandishments of the stage, which in his mind helped weld a mass of individuals into one conscious public, and because of the “tone of political feeling” that came from consorting with “a visible body-politic, a type and image of that huge Leviathan the State … that vast denomination, the People, of which we see a tenth part daily moving before us” (XII, 77). Still, Hazlitt’s enjoyment of metropolitan drama and shows was tinged with a deep mistrust of what he saw as the derealising tendency of modern urban life. The typical Cockney, he wrote, was “the poorest creature in the world”:

4

Time and space are lost to him. He is confined to one spot, and to the present moment. He sees every thing near, superficial, little, in hasty succession. The world turns round, and his head with it, like a roundabout at a fair, till he becomes stunned and giddy with the motion. Figures glide by as in a camera obscura. There is a glare, a perpetual hubbub, a noise, a crowd about him; he sees and hears a vast number of things, and knows nothing.

5Although attempts have been made, notably by Dart (Dart 2012, 61-84), to read such a passage in the precise context of the London writers’ complicated reaction to Tory attacks, Hazlitt’s choice of imagery reveals a high degree of implication—the metaphors of the roundabout, go-cart and phantasmagoria being, indeed, especially frequent under his pen. The “endless phantasmagoria” of London life (68) is that of rank rather than of the commodity, and the Republican in Hazlitt may here be seen raging against the Cockney’s apolitical infatuation with aristocratic display; more generally, however, the metaphor simultaneously figures the modern individual’s impaired capacity for genuine impressions and his overall loss of agency.

6In other words, the ever-expanding theatricality of London life, where the continued oppression of the Ancien Régime combines with the advent of mass culture, poses a threat to the political and aesthetic realisation of the self, with the stultifying “hubbub” of contemporary discourse and pageantry only compounding the crushing sense of belatedness David Bromwich has already analysed (Bromwich 104-49). “The present is an age of talkers, not of doers,” Hazlitt would write in The Spirit of the Age, adding that “we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements” (XI, 28); it is for a similar reason that modern tragedy, in league with the cant-purveyors of the steam-press, “is no longer like a vessel making the voyage of life … but … a handsomely-constructed steamboat, that is moved by the sole expansive power of words” (XII, 53). And while Hazlitt’s indictment of modern drama rests on his confident belief in the superiority of its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century forebears, even the magic of the most perfect classical performance could appear to him as dangerously subversive of the moral and intellectual energies:

7

The custom of going to the play night after night becomes a relief, a craving, a necessity—one cannot do without it … it kills time and saves the trouble of thinking. O, Covent Garden! “thy freedom has made me effeminate!” It has hardly left me power to write this description of it. I am become its slave, I have no other sense or interest left. There I sit and lose the hours I live beneath the sky, without the power to stir, without any determination to stay.

8Despite Hazlitt’s playful tone, this unexpectedly Puritan apostrophe to the fleshpots of London town betrays vital anxieties over the function of the arts and the fate of the man of letters. It is all the more significant, perhaps, for coming from a radical “metaphysician” who, in the 1805 Essay on the Principles of Human Action, had rested most of his hopes for the improvement and emancipation of the human species on a concept of “disinterested imagination” he liked to illustrate by an ideal spectator’s generous responsiveness to the drama. It may be another significant irony that his strictures on modern taste should have been published in the Whiggish London Magazine, an organ whose main purpose, in its editor’s words, was to represent the “METROPOLIS” and “convey the very ‘image, form, and pressure’ of that ‘mighty heart’ whose vast pulsations circulate life, strength, and spirits, throughout this great Empire” (Scott 1820, iv). For it is precisely his uneasy involvement with the grand machinery of modern culture that gives Hazlitt’s writing its edge, its agonistic and agonising quality. The “little jar [that] makes the whole composition tremble,” which Woolf (177) detected in his best essays, registers his frustration at an emergent state of affairs which a later French essayist would thus succinctly summarise: “Tout ce qui était directement vécu s’est éloigné dans une représentation” (Debord 1992, 15).

Embattled urbanity: The Round Table

9By the end of 1812, when he was hired as Parliamentary reporter by the Morning Chronicle, Hazlitt had already tried his luck as a portrait-painter, a metaphysician and an abridger-compiler; shortly after that time, he became a theatrical critic and an essayist. To get closer to the House of Commons, he had moved with his wife and children to lodgings in Petty France, Westminster. The house had been Milton’s, but it now belonged to Jeremy Bentham, and in that nicely symbolic setting Hazlitt—then 34 and often enraged by the hackneyed declamation of parliamentary debates—first undertook to write miscellaneous papers that, to his contemporaries, would inevitably conjure up memories of the great Augustan periodicals. The mantelpiece in his curtainless, dingy study was soon scribbled over with notes for future essays. Most of these would be published in the liberal-leaning Examiner, from 1814 to 1816, as part of the Round Table series co-authored with the weekly’s editor, Leigh Hunt. Hazlitt quickly became the main contributor to the project, and his Round Table pieces, reissued as a separate volume in 1817, are usually taken to signal his definitive emergence as an author of note; and although his voice could be modulated into a wide range of tones—from the polite objectivity of the Edinburgh Review to the occasional rabble-rousing of more radical organs such as the Yellow Dwarf—, its most unmistakeable strains begin to appear at that point.

10As editor of the Examiner and political hero of the hour, however (he had just spent two years in gaol for libel against the Prince Regent), Hunt had a defining influence over the series, writing the introductory numbers in his characteristically offhand manner; and his own understanding of the genre contrasts and complements Hazlitt’s in a way that sheds light on the main driving forces behind the latter’s subsequent practice. Both men intended to revive, yet also to revise the urbane tradition of the Tatler and Spectator, wary as they were of what they considered an overly polite and somewhat devitalising legacy. Hunt thus stated that “there has now been a sufficient distance of time since the publication of our good old periodical works, and a sufficient change in matters worthy of social observation, to warrant the appearance of a similar set of papers” (1841: 1), before adding that Addison’s plan for the domestication of national manners had been so completely carried out that—in a popular Sternian analogy—“the community … are at length in danger of resembling so much worn-out coin, which has not only lost the features upon it, and is grown blank by attrition, but begins to be weighed and found wanting even for the common purposes of society” (12). Hunt’s political liberalism made for a total cultural programme: against the artificial homogenisation of manners that had finally prevailed in British society, the time had come for an infusion into the periodic format of the more indulgent sociability represented in English letters by Fielding or Sheridan, as well as of the renovated aesthetic values of the post-revolutionary period (“to recommend an independent simplicity in Manners, a love of nature in Taste, and truth, generosity, and self-knowledge in Morals,” 17).

11Hazlitt subscribed to such a redefinition of the periodical essayists’ ideal urbanity, and in fact Hunt’s diagnosis may well have been influenced by his own 1813 letter to the Chronicle, now republished in the Round Table as the essay “On Modern Comedy”—where the attack is, however, mounted in a harsher tone:

12

We are drilled into a sort of stupid decorum, and forced to wear the same dull uniform of outward appearance; and yet it is asked, why the Comic Muse does not point, as she was wont, at the peculiarities of our gait and gesture, and exhibit the picturesque contrast of our dress and costume, in all that graceful variety in which she delights… . We are deficient in Comedy, because we are without characters in real life—as we have no historical pictures, because we have no faces proper for them … we see all objects from the same point of view, and through the same reflected medium;—we learn to exist, not in ourselves, but in books; all men become alike mere readers—spectators, not actors in the scene, and lose all proper personal identity.

13Like Hunt, Hazlitt wishes to rehabilitate “manner”—the notion is explored in another essay—as the spontaneity of individual “character,” whether graceful or eccentric, that the progress of manners has blotted out; Chaucer’s pilgrims, marching in procession along the high road in all the splendour of their various foibles, were incomparably more vital than the crowd of would-be gentlemen and critics that have replaced them. Hazlitt’s Round Table essays often chime in with Hunt’s preoccupations, and he is especially close to his associate when he praises the “sterling wit” of Steele’s Tatler, with its lively flair for the transient comedy of London life, against the more sermonising tone of Addison’s Spectator (thus Steele’s reflections are said to be “more like the remarks which occur in sensible conversation, and less like a lecture,” IV, 8).

14Yet his abrasive polemical style—immediately recognisable in the above excerpt from “On Modern Comedy”—clearly contrasts with the younger writer’s “art of deflection” (Bromwich 113) and his engaging vignettes. In literary-historical terms, the difference may be traced to divergent approaches to the essay as a genre, which, in Hazlitt’s case, ultimately amount to a clean break with the Addisonian tradition. His later celebration of Montaigne, in the 1819 Lectures on the English Comic Writers, suggests that the essayist’s characteristic manner should be inseparable from the immediacy of truth-seeking as well as of personal communication, freed from scholarly abstraction yet beyond mere subjectivism: “In treating of men and manners, he spoke of them as he found them, not according to preconceived notions and abstract dogmas; and he began by teaching us what he himself was … He was, in a word, the first author who was not a book-maker” (VI, 92-3). The rejection of second-hand authority, the felt gusto of broad, common daylight, the need to “come home to the bosoms and business of men,” are familiar hallmarks of Hazlitt’s writing. At the same time, the essay’s freedom from bookishness, its companionable ease and clarity, run the risk of compromising the quest for truth as soon as they are translated into widespread popularity: the Tatler and Spectator, although or rather because they owe so much of their charm to the fact that they enjoyed “the honey-moon of authorship,” and “wore the public favour in its newest gloss,” have nonetheless ushered in the era of the general reader, whereby common sense has degenerated into common-place, “familiarity [has] bred contempt,” and one kind of lifeless reflected medium has merely replaced another. This is why the essayist, for the very sake of the shared humanity he wishes to upholds, must now embrace apparent paradoxes in order to counter the universal diffusion of polite clichés. Thus Hazlitt, as an antidote to cultural simulacra, chooses to rehabilitate the long-despised sin of pedantry (“The good old Latin style of our forefathers, if it concealed the dullness of the writer, at least was a barrier against the impertinence, flippancy, and ignorance of the reader,” IV, 83), and sardonically rehearses, fifty years before Flaubert, the formidable catalogue of idées reçues that the “common-place critic” now accepts on trust (“he judges of matters of taste and reasoning as he does of dress and fashion, by the prevailing tone of good company … persons who live on their own estates, and other people’s ideas,” IV, 137). At this stage, the essayist’s proper task really becomes the defence and illustration of “uncommon sense,” and the Addisonian manufacture of consent has given way to an outright assault on the most widespread assumptions. This is particularly true in the post-Waterloo climate of Tory triumphalism, when questions of taste tend to shade into questions of general and political morality. In particular, Hazlitt’s memorable indictment of “good-nature, or what is often considered as such,” with its shrill polemical crescendo, marks a radical departure from both Augustan urbanity and Hunt’s “Cockney” ideal of easy good-fellowship:

15

A good-natured man is, generally speaking, one who does not like to be put out of his way; and as long as he can help it, that is, until the provocation comes home to himself, he will not. He does not create fictitious uneasiness out of the distresses of others; he does not fret and fume, and make himself uncomfortable about things he cannot mend, and that no way concern him, even if he could: but then there is no one who is more apt to be disconcerted by what puts him to any personal inconvenience, however trifling; who is more tenacious of his selfish indulgences, however unreasonable; or who resents more violently any interruption of his ease and comforts, the very trouble he is put to in resenting it being felt as an aggravation of the injury. A person of this character feels no emotions of anger or detestation, if you tell him of the devastation of a province, or the massacre of the inhabitants of a town, or the enslaving of a people; but if his dinner is spoiled by a lump of soot falling down the chimney, he is thrown into the utmost confusion, and can hardly recover a decent command of his temper for the whole day… . A good-natured man will debauch his friend’s mistress, if he has an opportunity; and betray his friend, sooner than share disgrace or danger with him. He will not forego the smallest gratification to save the whole world … he will betray his country to please a Minister, and sign the death-warrant of thousands of wretches, rather than forfeit the congenial smile, the well-known squeeze of the hand.

16One might say that Hazlitt’s romantic essay-writing starts out from the English version of the gentlemanly ideal, the honnête homme, only to anticipate, as it were, the cri du cœur of another nineteenth-century aspiring painter, Zola’s Claude Lantier (“Quels gredins que les honnêtes gens!”).

Authors, jugglers and actors: literature as performance

17Despite his rage at the empty hypocrisy of “good company,” Hazlitt never quite forgets the ideal urbane culture whose decadence he so forcibly laments. Hence his position, as a man of letters, is both deeply uneasy and unpredictably versatile. Uttara Natarajan, charting the subsequent progress of the essays from “the impersonal collective ‘we’ of The Round Table … to a distinctly assertive ‘I’ in The Plain Speaker” (1998: 180), from traditional moral analysis or literary criticism to freer forms and more shimmering textures, stresses Hazlitt’s growing confidence in his ability to replace decaying polite conventions with his own version of the “familiar style,” fusing disparate materials into a single integrated experience. One might add that this evolution is also encouraged by the unresolved dialectics of culture, already emerging in The Round Table, whereby Hazlitt variously confronts the difficulties besetting morals and literature in a post-classical age. Few of his theses, indeed, stand unambiguously by themselves. The pedant’s cheerful obliviousness to everything but his own hobby-horse, indulgently celebrated in “On Pedantry,” morphs by 1821 into the imaginative atrophy of “People with One Idea,” while, conversely, the Whiggish values of “On Classical Education” (it “gives men liberal views … and raises us above that low and servile fear, which bows only to present power and upstart authority,” IV, 4) are supplemented in 1818 by a proto-Nietzschean attack “On the Ignorance of the Learned,” where the life of a classical bookworm becomes a highbrow variant of the Cockney’s phantasmagoria (“an endless, wearisome succession of words and half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and continually efface one another,” VIII, 70). Similarly, the denunciation of the common-place calls for a symmetrical critique of the paradox-lover, and even his biting satires of West End footmen or genteel pretentions (“Gentility is only a more select and artificial kind of vulgarity,” VIII, 157) are balanced by an ambiguous inquiry—elitist and democratically-minded at the same time—into the “Look of a Gentleman” (“he looks and does as he likes, without any restraint, confusion, or awkwardness,” XII, 209). And then of course, as Natarajan points out, Hazlitt is the herald of negative capability, an inveterate foe to egotism literary or otherwise, who may even write, “I hate my style to be known; as I hate all idiosyncrasy” (VIII, 285), yet leaves his characteristic imprint on whatever materials are at hand.

18One of the most richly complex, as well as central, questions in Hazlitt’s work remains that of the status and scope of literature, or (more generally) genius; and his treatment of it bears ample witness to the pressures, both personal and broadly historical, which shaped his career as a periodical essayist. Although he may be seen, on the one hand, to oscillate in his various statements between popular and exclusive standpoints, he rigorously maintains another, more specifically Romantic distinction between general and technical literature, the former being made into the repository of the sensus communis against the encroachments of economic specialisation and Utilitarian morality. In “On the Conversation of Authors,” an imaginary female listener is taught that authors deal in books tout court: “‘Not receipt-books, Madonna, nor account-books, nor books of pharmacy, or the veterinary art (they belong to their respective callings and handicrafts) but books of liberal taste and general knowledge.’ … It is of [the] finer essence of humanity, ‘etherial mould, sky-tinctured,’ that books of the better sort are made” (XII, 25-26). To some extent, this distinction reiterates the more traditional one between liberal and mechanical arts. In the celebrated “On the Indian Jugglers,” for instance, the dazzling feats of various London entertainers, despite being executed “with all the ease, the grace, the carelessness imaginable … skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill,” remain of a highly particular and technical kind and, therefore, fall far short of the more uncertain endeavours of a great artist, who attempts to imitate the whole of Nature, and whose best works are suffused with a “grace beyond the reach of art [which] is then the height of art.” Yet the major drama of the essay’s opening lies in the poignant confrontation between any kind of “mechanical” skill and grace, on the one hand, and the author’s keen sense of comparative failure on the other:

19

I ask what there is I can do as well as this? Nothing. What have I been doing all my life? … Is there no one field where I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which others cannot find a flaw? The utmost I can pretend to do is to write a description of what this fellow can do. I can write a book: so can many others who have not even learned to spell. What abortions are these Essays!”

20The pathos and the yearning, here, arise from at least two causes. First, Hazlitt’s categories are not as water-tight as they appear to be, and the idea of conscious effort forgetting itself into pure spontaneous activity holds strong attraction for him. Thus “genius,” he contends in 1821, is only a higher manifestation of “common sense” properly understood, namely of a “particular sort of acquired and undefinable tact,” somewhat Ariel-like in its half-conscious operations: we feel expression, for instance, “by the instinct of analogy, by the principle of association, which is subtle and sure in proportion as it is variable and indefinite” (VIII, 31/38). Hazlitt’s own prose, in its more exalted moments, often feels like a tight-rope walk or athletic feat, as though the near-electric awakening of the associative and imaginative faculties could find an apt illustration in quick, perfect bodily movements (“poetry,” after all, “puts a spirit of life and motion into the universe,” V, 3). From the standpoint of the essayist’s own values, then, there is a sense in which the juggler’s or fives-player’s sheer energies are far superior to the efforts of the literary spectator. Secondly, the comparison suggests that the author who fails to reach the heights of human nature—and especially the professional author, who has nothing else to show for himself—risks falling far below the common level; the inept dauber or Grub-street starveling is the exact obverse of the true artistic genius in that he embodies the essential misery of man instead of his essential majesty. In fact, Hazlitt occasionally applies economic and quasi-Utilitarian notions to the trade of authorship, notably when—still in “On Genius and Common Sense”—the (partly classical) wish to excel in a single field translates for the writer into the mental specialisation necessary to redeem his place in the scheme of things: “The division of labour is an excellent principle in taste as well as in mechanics. Without this, I find from Adam Smith, we could not have a pin made to the degree of perfection it is… . All that talent which is not necessary to the actual quantity of excellence existing in the world, loses its object, is so much waste talent or talent to let” (VIII, 49-50). And in the more optimistic mood of “On Application to Study,” with its superb description of the writing process as a chemical “state of projection,” Hazlitt’s cherished blending of vital agency and mechanical perfection is realised in his own professional efficiency: from the remark that the great painters were “thorough-bred workmen,” we are led to the assertion that “the mind makes, at some period or other, one Herculean effort, and the rest is mechanical,” before Hazlitt, with a hint of bravado, declares that he can transfer the “characters” of his brain onto paper “as mechanically as any one might copy the letters in a sampler” (XII, 60-62).

21At other times, however, the peculiar trade or performance of the man of letters—what Kirsten Daly calls his “creative spectatorship” (Daly 36)—fails him; it is his turn to pay an admittance fee which is too high for him, and, as hinted above, his sense of supreme agency gives way to helpless vulnerability. Such passages as the following, from “On the Aristocracy of Letters,” are amongst Hazlitt’s most memorable in their reduction of the “mere author” to the bare forked animal that is man:

22

There is not a more helpless or a more despised animal than a mere author, without any extrinsic advantages of birth, breeding, or fortune to set him off… . The best wits, like the handsomest faces upon the town, lead a harassing, precarious life—are taken up for the bud and promise of talent, which they no sooner fulfil than they are thrown aside like an old fashion—are caressed without reason, and insulted with impunity—are subject to all the caprice, the malice, and fulsome advances of that great keeper, the Public—and in the end come to no good, like all those who lavish their favours on mankind at large and look to the gratitude of the world for their reward. Instead of this set of Grub-street authors, the mere canaille of letters, this corporation of Mendicity, this ragged regiment of genius suing at the corner of the streets, in forma pauperis, give me the gentleman and scholar, with a good house over his head and a handsome table “with wine of Attic taste” to ask his friends to …

23In this vehement revision of the Augustan Grub-street nightmare, the old imputation of venality—with the Public, oddly, acting simultaneously as female jilt and male keeper—takes on added poignancy because, by being “felt home,” it combines with a Shakespearian sense of human exposure. Only by bearing the burden of generic humanity, Hazlitt suggests, can the man of letters give a degraded modern culture such power over himself. In “On the Want of Money,” a good-humoured sketch of the embarrassments of poverty, replete with anecdotes of Sheridan’s skill at fending off his duns, leads similarly to the evocation of the pathetic Ecce Homo in Hogarth’s dying Rake (another failed author), followed by an enumeration of the thousand ways man-as-a-writer may see his aspirations maimed and thwarted until he is “plagued out of [his] life,” and left to “look about for a place to die in” (XVII, 185).

24This may be why—beyond obvious biographical reasons—Hazlitt sometimes considers other artistic callings as havens, or ways of escape, from the treadmill and potential abjection of authorship. As Roy Parks has shown (Parks 95-114), painting appealed to Hazlitt on philosophic grounds, because of its insusceptibility to lazy generalisation. One may further note that its combination of industry and serenity, minute technical attention and near-religious absorption, constant novelty and lasting purpose, offers a clear alternative which to the equivocations of the literary world: “The hand and eye are equally employed. In tracing the commonest object, a plant or the stump of a tree, you learn something every moment… . You need not play tricks, or purposely mistake: with all your pains, you are still far short of the mark. Patience grows out of the endless pursuit, and turns it into a luxury” (VIII, 5). If the strong pastoral overtones of the essay seem to add a town/country antithesis to the opposition between the arts, we should nonetheless observe that Hazlitt, despite his avowed preference for more “ideal” painters such as Raphael or Titian, responded with equal gusto to the London comedy of Hogarth, whose mercurial yet masterful penetration (“Every thing in his pictures has life and motion in it … The expression is always taken en passant, in a state of progress and change,” IV, 28) offered obvious affinities with his own manner understood as “a kind of extempore writing” (XVI, 222). Indeed, the great satirist’s shifting status within Hazlitt’s personal hierarchy of painters is an eloquent index to his complicated attitude towards the multitudinous spectacle of the metropolis.

25But Hazlitt’s alternative sphere par excellence was, of course, the playhouse: a “school” or “discipline” of humanity, as he frequently wrote; the only place where a crowd was not oppressive, and for the essayist “the chief and enviable transfer of his being from the real to the unreal world, and the changing half his life into a dream” (although a veteran dramatic critic, Hazlitt never seems to associate that specific task with any kind of laboriousness). The theatrum mundi is a potent trope in his work, and at times the whole of human existence appears to find its perfect realisation in the vivid passion of drama (“all that can strike the sense, can touch the heart, can stir up laughter or call tears from their secret source, is here treasured up and displayed ostentatiously,” XVII, 369), just as all London streets somehow lead to Drury Lane. The theatre itself may in fact provide inspiration for an active bearing in life: we must attend, Hazlitt says, “not [to] our exit nor our entrance upon the stage, but [to] what we do, feel and think while there” (VIII, 28), and Kirsten Daly aptly defines his writing style as “actorly” (Daly 38). In a world of make-believe, actors are “the only honest hypocrites.” Yet, as we saw, the very perfection of human existence which is to be found in the “enchanted mirror” of the best drama is, unsurprisingly, predicated on the dissociation of action/passion and listless absorption, of reality and illusion; in the ambiguous comedy of metropolitan life, actors play a supremely representative part, albeit an “enchanted” or a sparkling one, in that their glory is always, as it were, surrounded with a halo of derision:

26

Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness. The height of their ambition is to be beside themselves. To-day kings, to-morrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that they are nothing. Made up of mimic laughter and tears, passing from the extremes of joy or woe at the prompter’s call, they wear the livery of other men’s fortunes; their very thoughts are not their own. They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them …

27The unreality of representation is peculiarly apparent in the fact that it always partakes of retrospection. It is no coincidence that one of the Tatler’s chief virtues lay in its archaeological frivolousness (“London, a hundred years ago, would be better worth seeing than Paris at the present moment,” IV, 8); and the magic of the stage, likewise, is hardly separable from the lure of temporal regression, so that the best performances, at least in Hazlitt’s more personal essays, take the spectator back to the gorgeously inconsequential days of Restoration libertinism, to a half-erotic, half-picturesque fantasy of “enormous hoops and stiff stays” (IV, 13). The nec plus ultra of theatrical pleasure, in fact, would be to see “all the celebrated actors, for the last hundred years … appear on the boards of Covent-Garden and Drury-Lane, for the last time, in their most brilliant parts” (IV, 157). Because their art and achievements are transient by definition, actors and actresses are singularly fitted to become the representatives of a city of shades, of another, fairy London in the interstices of the present (on a graver note, the aged Kemble is thus perceived as “a stately hieroglyphic of humanity; a living monument of departed greatness”). In this, Hazlitt comes very close to his friend Lamb, whom he cast, in The Spirit of the Age, into a part that himself felt strongly drawn towards without ever fully embracing it, that of the lonely London flâneur whose very quaintness and obscurity fit him to become the tutelary genius of the place. Hazlitt’s fate and temper, of course, are to remain bound to the present and its contradictions. He does not “haunt Watling-street like a gentle spirit” (XI, 181); neither has he “shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much Life” (Lamb 1975, 267). Yet his own essay-writing remains haunted by ultimately ambivalent retrospective delights, in which the author’s subjectivity is at once redeemed and imperilled.

Seen through a medium: power, gusto and mortality

28I have suggested that Hazlitt’s writings as an essayist bear reluctant affinities with a whole range of (mostly urban) entertainments and spectacles, in which he finds, simultaneously or by turns, the joy of an intenser life and the confirmation of his disempowerment. Another, related form of his unease can be perceived in many of his literary and political works: those that deal with the poetical character’s proneness to apostasy. Hazlitt’s well-known post-war attacks on the “turncoats” Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey are underpinned by a full-fledged psychology which, hitherto, has mostly been analysed in terms of the metaphysics of (imaginative) power. Uttara Natarajan, in particular, has cogently shown how the free-born man’s innate power—his imagination, which is both potentially emancipatory and neutral in itself—may be corrupted and made to serve the extrinsic, inauthentic power of kings and their political machinery (Natarajan 166-72; see also Whale 110-39). Hazlitt’s paramount examples of this baleful sympathy with amoral power, as several critics have noted, are Edmund Burke (cf. “Arguing in a Circle”: “Politics became poetry in his hands … Mr. Burke was much of a theatrical man,” XIX, 272) and, less obviously, Wordsworth (the famous definition of poetry as “right-royal,” in the Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, is preceded by the notorious “Carnage is thy daughter” line from the Laker’s Thanksgiving Ode).

29This, however, is what might be called the sublime aspect of the poetical character’s affinity for power. To it may be added a softer and more “beautiful” temptation, that of political betrayal stemming from listless abstraction in an ideal pleasurable world, of imaginative power recoiling against the higher ends it ought to serve. Instances would include, to varying degrees, Spenser, Coleridge, and Southey; and quite possibly this is a tendency Hazlitt recognises in himself. Bromwich (259) aptly writes that “English culture during the Regency is, in [his] view of it, a Castle of Indolence, kept up by enchanters fluent in any kind of luxury.” There, indeed, is the mainspring of poetical versatility: “poetry dwells in a perpetual Utopia of its own, and is, for that reason, very ill calculated to make a Paradise upon earth, by encountering the shocks and disappointments of the world … jostling with the crowd, it is liable to be overthrown, trampled on, and defaced” (IV, 151). Interestingly, what is described here in terms of effeminacy (“Their souls are effeminate, half man and half woman,” 152) is characterised in a related essay as a surfeit of reflection or mediatisation:

30

It is the province of literature to anticipate the dissipation of real objects, and to increase it. It creates a fictitious restlessness and craving after variety, by creating a fictitious world around us, and by hurrying us, not only through all the mimic scenes of life, but by plunging us into the endless labyrinths of imagination. Thus the common indifference produced by the distraction of successive amusements, is superseded by a general indifference to surrounding objects, to real persons and things, occasioned by the disparity between the world of our imagination and that without us… . All actions are seen through that general medium which reduces them to individual insignificance.

31The image of a refracting medium usurping immediate feeling, impeding moral apprehension and precluding decisive action is, indeed, a striking Hazlittian leitmotiv. To give only a very few other examples: everything comes to the Cockney “through a medium of levity and impertinence” (XII, 67), while members of the modern public, we remember, “see every thing from the same point of view, and through the same reflected medium” (IV, 12); Turner’s paintings, although he is “the ablest landscape painter of the age,” are “representations not so properly of the objects of nature as of the medium through which they are seen” (“On Imitation,” IV, 76), just as, in Wordsworth’s poetry, “every object is seen through the medium of innumerable recollections, is clothed with the haze of imagination like a glittering vapour, is obscured with the excess of glory, has the shadowy brightness of a waking dream” (IV, 112); and in “Why Distant Objects Please,” Hazlitt writes of the softening effects of time and memory that “our sorrows after a certain period have been so often steeped in a medium of thought and passion that they ‘unmould their essence’; and all that remains of our original impressions is what we would wish them to have been.” (VIII, 256). The metaphor naturally arises from Hazlitt’s familiarity with painting, and he uses it a variety of contexts, some of them comparatively trivial. Yet, as the juxtaposition of these few excerpts suggests, it can be seen as crystallising some of his most conflicting attitudes towards art, modernity, and their articulation. It may evoke the dreary, bewildering smog of London opinion and culture, the solitary power of the modern artist dispensing with the actual presence of natural objects, or the disappointed radical cherishing his fondest memories; it may connote conformism or individuality, frustration or compensation, but in all cases it defines the modern subject by the loss of original immediacy. In Schillerian terms, sentimental reflection or refraction has taken the place of naïve feeling.

32The central Hazlittian notion of gusto (“power or passion defining any object,” IV, 77) is an expression of resistance to this state of affairs. It is no coincidence that the essayist should illustrate it primarily from painting, a more immediate medium, as it were, than that of words, or at least a more sensuous and tangible one. Yet gusto is by definition, in the lived experience of the individual, a transient quality, or rather it is always about to blend or melt into the more diffuse (re)workings of memory and imagination—which, because of their fundamentally associative nature, inevitably tend to multiply impressions and ideas, and in the end to weaken their impact, so that the “power” of imagination may in fact (as in Wordsworth’s case) work in direct opposition to the intensity of primary emotions. That is why, incidentally, Shakespeare’s infinite invention can be said to “take from his gusto,” and indeed Hazlitt’s own prose seems to progress, at times, through a dense “medium” of memorable quotations, analogous to youthful memories and drifting ever further from their original context and import. The great pastoral and/or autobiographical essays which rank among his most canonical are always, for the same reason, fraught with a secret dissonance: the nostalgic pleasure into which the solitary withdraws is, despite the optimistic view of memory developed in “Why Distant Objects Please,” in constant danger of being recognised as unsubstantial. The man who lived to himself, for instance, might find refuge behind the loop-holes of some Cowperian retreat and, instead of being part of the machine that never stands still, content himself with being “a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things” (VIII, 91)—in other words, not a busy, officious, Addisonian spectactor, but rather a de-personalised instance of the negative capability. It is not certain, however, that such a man can actually exist for long, even in Hazlitt’s prose. “On Living to One’s-Self” ends with a ringing invective against the Public and Reviews, while in other essays the awakening of rural impressions and fond memories nearly always rises into a shimmering, all-encompassing haze of retrospect which is essentially the obverse of present loss. Thus, in “Why Distant Objects Please,” the memory of the organ heard during a country walk, like a dramatic or operatic performance, “still … swells upon the ear, and wraps me in a golden trance, drowning the noisy tumult of the world” (VIII, 260), and in “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth”— his sceptical answer to Wordsworth’s theodicy of memory—Hazlitt will write that retrospection itself gnaws at present realities: “Instead of the full, pulpy feeling of youth, every thing is flat and insipid” (XVII, 198).

33This is why gusto, and particularly the essayist’s gusto, cannot and must not be wholly identified with, say, the exquisite glow of a woman’s portrait by Titian. There is another aspect to gusto as Hazlitt sees it, a pugnacious, grasping, grappling quality, which may be discovered (albeit with a hint of nostalgia) in his characterisation of Chaucer as both the originator of English poetry and the poet of an original encounter with the world:

34

There were none of the common-places of poetic diction in our author’s time, no reflected lights of fancy, no borrowed roseate tints; he was obliged to inspect things for himself, to look narrowly, and almost to handle the object, as in the obscurity of morning we partly see and partly grope our way; so that his descriptions have a sort of tangible character belonging to them, and produce the effect of sculpture on the mind.

35A Baconian attention to the subject at hand is in order if the essayist is to paint or characterise it truly. But the concentrated tenaciousness here ascribed to Chaucer’s historical position can also be seen as a sign of political mettle. Dante and Milton, those partisan poets, are two notable exceptions to the habitual “effeminacy” of the literary character, and they both have great gusto—the latter, indeed, “repeats his blow twice; grapples with and exhausts his subject” (IV, 79). The pugilistic imagery recurs in Hazlitt’s praise of William Cobbett, the fierce, radical editor of the Political Register, whose blows are as hard as those of a popular boxing champion, but who is nevertheless “one of the best writers of language,” speaking “plain, broad, downright English,” gifted with “the clearness of Swift, the naturalness of Defoe, and the picturesque satirical description of Mandeville,” yet being in truth “like nobody but himself” (VIII, 80). Gusto, in prose, is an attempt not only to paint, but to fight in words so as to stand on one’s own; to overcome, one might say, the humiliation of mere spectatorship. Hazlitt’s notorious virulence, therefore, is much more than ill-humour or straightforward political polemic: it is a desperate bid to come to grips with the facticity of modern culture, as well as with the essayist’s own dereliction. If an acute, yet rebellious sense of abjection and impotence often erupts into Hazlitt’s writings—we remember, of course, that he was also the author of the self-exposing Liber Amoris—, it is partly because, for him, the remorseless dissection of failure is a way of retaining some form of insight and agency, a last-ditch defence against the forces of death-in-life; for “we do not in the regular course of nature die all at once: we have mouldered away gradually long before; faculty after faculty, attachment after attachment, we are torn from ourselves piece-meal while living” (XVII, 198). The tragic gusto with which Hazlitt is willing to anatomise his condition, to convert the wear-and-tear of existence into lacerating savagery, must in the end differentiate him from those literary characters whose life is another, rosier kind of living death (“a sort of dim twilight existence, a sort of wandering about in an Elysian Fields of our own making,” IV, 135). Raging against the dying of the light, ranting about mortality, the essayist attempts to pierce through the general reader’s hazy complacency, as well as to go on living, a little while, against the odds. This via negativa to authenticity, perhaps, is another modern trait of Hazlitt Agonistes, the Timon of London.