The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 01 (of 12)

Ii

It was from Nether-Stowey that Hazlitt dated his regard for poetry. But if literature came late to him, as (his father’s office and his own metaphysical inklings aiding) it did, he ever cherished a pure and ardent passion for it, once it had come. Yet he was by no means widely read, and in his last years seldom finished a new book. First and last, indeed, he was a man of few books and fewer authors. Shakespeare, Burke, Cervantes, Rabelais, Milton, the Decameron, the Nouvelle Héloïse and the Confessions, Richardson’s epics of the parlour and Fielding’s epics of the road—these things and their kind he read intensely; and, when it pleased him to speak of them, it was ever in the terms of understanding and regard. Yet it was long ere he had any thought of writing; and it was necessity alone that made him a man of letters. In the beginning, the Pulpit proving impossible, he turned to painting for a career, and, after certain studies, presumably under his elder brother John,[4] and possibly under Northcote, he went to the Paris of the First Consul, and painted there for some four months in a Louvre which the thrift of Bonaparte had stored with the choicest plunder in Italian Art. I know not whether or no he could ever have been a painter. Haydon, who neither loved nor understood him, and was, besides, a man who could greatly dare and ‘toil terribly’—Haydon says that he was at once too lazy and too timid ever to succeed in painting: an art in which, as Haydon showed, and as Millet was presently to say, ‘You must flay yourself alive, and give your skin.’[5] I do not think that Hazlitt was daunted by what may be called the painfulness of painting; for in letters he was soon enough to prove that he had in him to face a world in arms, and to tincture his writings, if need were, with the best blood of his heart. In any case, after divers essays at copying in the Louvre,[6] and certain attempts at portraiture on his return to England,[7] he found that he could not excel; that, in fact, he was neither Titian nor Rembrandt, nor could he even be Sir Joshua. So he painted no more, but went on reading certain painters: very much, I assume, as he went on taking certain authors; because he loved them for themselves, and found emotions—and not only emotions, but sensations[8]—in them.

His ideals are Claude, Rembrandt, Raphael, Poussin, Titian; he gives you very gentlemanly and intelligent estimates of Watteau and Velasquez; he has an eye—a right one—for Rubens and Van Dyck; he exults in Jan Steen, has words of worth for Ruysdael and Hobbima, and gives Turner as neat a croc-en-jambe as you could wish to see. But, despite his training and his gift, he is no more in advance of his age than the best of us here and now. To him the Carraccis and Salvator are sommités of a kind; if, so far as I remember, he will have nought to do with Carlo Dolci, he will not do without his Guido; I have read no word of his on Lawrence, no word of his on Constable, none on Morland; on Hogarth he is chiefly literary, on Turner not much more than diabolically ingenious. Wisely or not, he took pictures as he took books: they might be few, but they must be good; and, not only good but, of (as he believed) the best. If they were not, or if they were new, he drew them not to his heart, nor adorned the chambers of his mind with them. Those chambers were filled with good things long since done. To him, then, what were the best things doing? It was his habit to take the good thing on; savour its excellences to their last sucket; meditate it strictly, jealously, privily, longingly; say, if it must be so, a few last words about it—some for the painter, more for the man of letters;[9] and then...? Well, then he accepted the situation. I do not know that he cared much for Keats; I do know that he found Shelley impossible, that he was never an exalted Wordsworthian, and that he hesitated—(ever so little, but he hesitated!)—even at Charles Lamb. Politics and all, in truth, he was a prophet who adored the past, and had but an infidel eye for the promise of the years. He was interested only in the highest achievement; and to be the highest even that must lie behind him. Thus, Fielding was good, and Rubens; Sir Joshua was good, and so were Richardson and Smollett; so, likewise, Shakespeare was good, and Raphael and Titian were good—these with Milton and Rembrandt, and Burke and Rousseau and Boccaccio; and it was well. Well with them, and well—especially well!—with him: they had achieved, and here was he, the perfect lover, to whom their achievement was as an enchanted garden, a Prospero’s Island abounding in romantic and inspiring chances, unending marvels, miracles of vision and solace and pure, perennial delight. And if these, the ‘Thrones, Dominations, Powers,’ had done their work, and were venerable in it, so also in their degrees and sorts had Congreve and Watteau, Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Wycherley and Jordaens; so had even Salvator and John Buncle. In dealing with painters, and with purely painters’ pictures, Hazlitt generally strikes a right note.[10] But the man of letters in him is inevitably first; and ’tis not insignificant that some of the ‘crack passages’ in his writings about pictures are rhapsodies about places—Burleigh or Oxford—or pieces of pure literature like that very human and ingenious essay ‘On the Pleasures of Painting,’ which is one of the best good things in Table Talk.

Iii

So Hazlitt the painter was gathered to his fathers, and in his stead a Hazlitt reigned about whom the world knows little worth the telling: a Hazlitt who abridged philosophers, and made grammars, and compiled anthologies; a married and domesticated Hazlitt; a Hazlitt with a son and heir, and a wife who seems to have cared as little for his works and him as, in the long run, he assuredly cared for her company and her. The lady’s name was Stoddart; she was a brisk, inconsequent, unsexual sort of person—a friend of Mary Lamb; and, like the only Mrs. Pecksniff, ‘she had a small property.’ It was situate at Winterslow, certain miles from Salisbury, and Hazlitt, who loved the neighbourhood, and clung to it till the end, has so far illustrated the name that, if there could ever be a Hazlitt Cult, the place would instantly become a shrine. It was a cottage, within easy walking distance of Wilton and Stonehenge; and in 1812 the Hazlitts, who were made one in 1808, departed it—it and the well-beloved woods of Norman Court—for 19 York Street, Westminster.[11] Hence it was that he issued to deliver his first course of lectures;[12] and here it was that he entertained those friends he had, made himself a reputation by writing in papers and magazines, drank hard, and cured himself of drinking, and long ere the end came found his wife insufferable. In the beginning he worked in the Reporters’ Gallery, where he made notes (in long hand) for The Morning Chronicle, and learned to take more liquor than was good for him.[13] In this same journal he printed some of his best political work, and broke ground as a critic of acting; and he left it only because he could not help quarrelling with its proprietors.