WILLIAM HAZLITT

WEDNESDAY evening in Inner Temple Lane, a dingy room with low ceiling and a scarcity of furniture. Books and old prints look upon the intruder with sedate and watchful eyes. An atmosphere of musty antiquity and tobacco smoke. On the sideboard there is a cold joint of beef, and beside it a big jug of porter, from which guests may refresh themselves at will.

Beside the fireplace towers the corpulent but imposing figure of Coleridge. He is talking rapidly in his rich, sonorous voice to an attentive circle of listeners, his blue eye flashing with inspiration and enthusiasm as he warms to his subject. Beside him is a stiff, angular figure clad in grey worsted, half listening, half meditating-need we specify him as the poet of Rydal Mount? The host-Charles Lamb a little man with a big head and a sly, whimsical expression, stands at some distance from the other, interjecting some humorous comment on his friend's outpouring. Leaning against the wall is Hazlitt, a man of middle height, with dark hair curling over his forehead, quick restless eyes, and somewhat defiant expression. A little man with a sallow-looking visage, bright eyes and an exquisitely musical voice, breaks in upon the

conversation at times, and is listened to with an attention scarcely less rapt than that accorded to Coleridge. This is Thomas de Quincey, and Hazlitt and he vie with each other in shabbiness of attire. A remarkable gathering, truly, of genius and Bohemianism. But while several of the gathering had a strain of wildness in them none were so unmistakably vagabonds of literature as Hazlitt and De Quincey. Lamb and Hazlitt are often bracketed together as literary Bohemians, but Lamb's Bohemianism was quite on the surface. He was at heart devoted to convention, and when released from his drudgery of clerkship he has frankly confessed how potent an influence routine had been and still was in his life. Even his wanderings on paper are more apparent than real, and there is a method in his quaintest fantasies. But Hazlitt was a vagabond, a wanderer in the fullest sense, and there was something of the untamed about both him and De Quincey. Two extraordinary interesting personalities in an age of interesting personalities.

Wordsworth claimed for imaginative vision an inner veracity, a power of penetrating to the root of things, but it was Coleridge who first appropriated this faculty of the imagination for critical purposes. Thus he made criticism, no less than poetry, a creative art.

Hazlitt was his lineal successor in criticism just as Frederick Denison Maurice was in theological thought, and if not so great in insight, yet transcended his master in lucidity and brilliance. Criticism in the eighteenth century had been for the most part hard

and mechanical; the cold light of logic and reason according to the ideals of the time was considered a sufficient equipment. And so we find Dr Johnson airily disposing of Lycidas as "easy, vulgar and therefore disgusting"; Lord Lansdowne declining to discuss Shakespeare's soliloquies on the ground that

not one in all his works could be excused by Reason or Nature." Sometimes a critic was kindly enough to attempt to improve the poor Elizabethan. Dryden assisted to give symmetry to the Tempest by devising as a mate for Miranda a man who had never seen a maid. Pope was offended by Shakespeare's "wrong choice of subjects," and charitably concludes that it was due to the fact that he was dependent for his subsistence on pleasing the taste of tradesmen and mechanics.

But at the close of the century a revolution took place in critical as in other regions of thought. Lessing led the way in Germany, followed by Coleridge in England. And the method of this new school was to interpret, to sympathetically identify oneself with the author, learn his secrets and unfold them. This needs a more than common strength and plasticity of imagination, but in the hands of masters like Goethe, Schlegel, Lessing, Victor Hugo, Coleridge, Hazlitt and Lamb, wonders were accomplished. Each stood by himself in outlook and predilections, one excelling where another failed, but each carried the freshness and eagerness of the ardent imagination into their work.

Lamb, of course, is far better known to the general reader than Hazlitt. Like Dickens, "the gentle Charles" is a household word, whereas Hazlitt is little more than a name in a catalogue to many. Yet as a critic it may be doubted whether Lamb is any better known than Hazlitt. Lamb's fame as the whimsical Elia, his picturesque personality and his charming extravagances as a letter-writer, have somewhat obscured his reputation as the author of Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Contemporary with Shakespeare, yet it must not be forgotten that with his fine literary epicureanism he re-discovered the old dramatic poets, and opened up a new world to future scholars and litterateurs. Hazlitt, more wayward and capricious in his tastes, is not so safe a guide as Lamb, but where he enjoyed and appreciated no man could better convey this enjoyment to others. And even better than his literary portraits with all their daring brilliance are his essays on men and things, which for discursive wisdom and freshness of thought almost equal those of Montaigne. As Hazlitt truly said, Montaigne is the pioneer of this style of essay writing, being the first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man.

Although in later life Hazlitt's strange humours and bursts of petty feeling made him difficult to get on with and proved very trying to his friends, yet in earlier days before ill-health had soured his temper and vicissitudes of fortune made him bitter-he was a youth of singular charm. Silent and reserved with

strangers, he was a most delightful conversationalist to those whom he cared for, abounding in enthusiasm and quick to respond to the enthusiasm of others. Lacking Coleridge's remarkable powers of expression, he was far more intelligible and more amenable to suggestions from others. No one could be fairer in argument than he, though at times, when he sat down to write-as when dealing with Byron-personal prejudices would carry away his cooler judgment.

At this time he was an itinerant young portrait painter with a taste for philosophy. But dissatisfied with his artistic power, he turned his attention more assiduously to philosophy and politics. He seems to have been a clever painter without the patience to master properly the career of his art. Like some of his literary portraits, however, at a later date, his paintings were often more dashing than recognisable. Southey thought that the portrait of Coleridge resembled " a horse-stealer on his trial, evidently guilty, but clever enough to have a chance of getting off." Many were mere pot-boilers, and were chiefly valuable as providing him with a little ready cash. On one occasion, we are told, he hurried over the portrait of a rich manufacturer in desperate anxiety to pocket the five guineas, and after achieving his end, hurried away to dine on sausages and mashed potatoes. While they were getting ready," he says, " and I could hear them hissing in the pan, I read a volume of Gil Blas, containing an account of the fair Aurora." But if he gave up the brush he never gave up paint