Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/584

Rh 550 H A Z L I T T whose temper was fitful and moody, and the intensity of whose passions rendered him for the time insensible to the feelings and rightful claims of those who might stand in the way of their gratification. The dissolution of the ill-assorted union was nevertheless deferred for fourteen years, during which much of his best literary work had been produced. After three or four years, during which he almost disappears from observation, he came forward pro minently as a writer in the Examiner and as a lecturer at the Surrey Institution, bringing out in rapid succession his Hound Table, a collection of essays on literature, men, and manners, his View of the contemporary English stage, and his lectures on the poets, the English comic writers, and the dramatic literature of the age of Elizabeth. By these works, together with his Characters of Shakespeare s Plays (1817), and his Table Talk (1821), his reputation as a critic and essayist will mainly be sustained. Next to Coleridge, Hazlitt was perhaps the most powerful exponent of the dawning perception that Shakespeare s art was no less marvellous than his genius ; and Hazlitt s criticism did not, like Coleridge s, remain in the condition of a series of brilliant but fitful glimpses of insight, but was elaborated with steady care. His lectures on the Elizabethan drama tists performed a similar service for the earlier, sweeter, and simpler among them, such as Dekker, till then unduly eclipsed by later writers like Massinger, better playwrights but worse poets. Treating of the contemporary drama, lie successfully vindicated for Edmund Kean (whom, how ever, he had at first disparaged) the high place which he has retained as an actor; while his criticisms on the English comic writers and men of letters in general are masterpieces of ingenious and felicitous exposition, though rarely, like Coleridge s, penetrating to the inmost core of the subject. As an essayist Hazlitt is even more effective than as a critic, for this style of composition allows more scope to the striking individuality of his character. Being enabled to select his own subjects, he escapes dependence upon others either for his matter or his illustrations, and presents himself by turns as a metaphysician, a moralist, a humorist, a painter of manners and characteristics, but always, whatever his ostensible theme, deriving the essence of his commentary from his own bosom. This combination of intense subjectivity with strict adherence to his subject is oue of Hazlitt s most distinctive and creditable traits. Intellectual truthfulness is a passion with him. He steeps his topic in the hues of his own individuality, but never uses it as a means of self-display. The first reception of these admirable essays was by no means in accordance with their deserts. Hazlitt s political sympathies and a itipathies were vehement, and he had taken the unfashion able side. The Quarterly attacked him with deliberate malignity, stopped the sale of his writings for a time, and blighted his credit with publishers. He had become estranged from his early friends, the Lake poets, by what he uncharitably but not unnaturally regarded as their pjlitical apostasy; as well as by an escapade of his own, obscurely related, but apparently not creditable. His inequalities of temper separated him for a time even from Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb, and on the whole the p3rioi of his most brilliant literary success was that when ha was most soured and broken. Domestic troubles super vened; his marriage, long little more than nominal, was dissolved in consequence of the infatuated passion he had conceived for a servant girl, a most ordinary person in the eyes of every one else. It is impossible to regard Hazlitt as a responsible agent while he continued subject to this influence. His own record of the transaction, published by himself under the title of Liber Amoris, or the Neiv Pyg malion (1823), is a most remarkable psychological curiosity, and one of the most signal examples extant of the power of genuine passion, not merely to palliate what is wrong, but to dignify what is ridiculous. &quot; His idolatry,&quot; says Mrs Jameson, &quot; in its intense earnestness and reality assumes something of the sublimity of an act of faith.&quot; The business-like dissolution of his marriage under the law of Scotland is related with amazing naivete by the family biographer. Kid of his wife and cured of his mistress, he shortly afterwards astonished his friends by marrying a widow. &quot;All I know,&quot; says his grandson, &quot;is that Mrs Bridgewater became Mrs Hazlitt.&quot; They travelled on the Continent for a year, and then parted never to meet again. I described in a series of letters contributed to the Morning Chronicle, had a deep effect upon him, and perhaps conduced to that intimacy with the cynical old painter Northcote which, shortly after his return, engendered a curious but eminently readable volume of conversations with him. The respective shares of author and artist are not always easy to determine. During the recent agitations of his life he had been writing essays, collected in 1826 under the title of The Plain Speaker ; others subsequently written were published after his death. They are in no respect inferior to his earlier performances. The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of criticisms on the leading intellectual characters j of the day, reveals that he was less qualified to assign their ! true place to contemporaries than to revise the verdicts of the past, but is in point of style perhaps the most splendid and copious of his compositions. It is eager and animated to impetuosity, with no trace of carelessness or disorder, He now undertook a work which was to have crowned his literary reputation, but which can hardly be said to have even enhanced itThe Life of Napoleon (1828-30). The undertaking was at best premature, and was inevitably dis figured by partiality to Napoleon as the representative of the popular cause, excusable and even becoming in a Liberal politician writing in the days of the Holy Alliance, but preposterous now that the true tendencies of French imperialism are recognized. Owing to the failure of his publishers Hazlitt received no recompense for this laborious work. Pecuniary anxieties and disappointments may have contributed to hasten his death, which took place on September 18, 1830. Charles Lamb was with him to the last. With many serious defects both on the intellectual and the moral side, Hazlitt s character in both had at least the merit of sincerity and consistency. He was a compound of intellect and passion, and the refinement of his critical analysis is associated with vehement eloquence and glowing imagery. He was essentially a critic, a dissector, and, as Bulwer justly remarks, a much better judge of men of thought than of men of action. But he also possessed many gifts in no way essential to the critical character, and tran scending the critic s ordinary sphere. These, while giving him rank as an independent writer, frequently perturbed the natural clearness of his critical judgment, and seduced him into the paradoxes with which his works abound. These paradoxes, however, never spring from affectation ; they are in general the sallies of a mind so agile and ardent as to overrun its own goal. His style is perfectly natural, and yet admirably calculated for effect. His diction, always rich and masculine, seems to kindle as he proceeds; and when thoroughly animated by his subject, he advances with a succession of energetic, hard-hitting sentences, each carry ing his argument a step further, like a champion dealing out blows as he presses upon the enemy. Although, how ever, his grasp upon his subject is strenuous, his insight into it is rarely profound. He can amply satisfy men of taste and culture ; he cannot, like Coleridge or Burke,. dissatisfy them with themselves by showing them how much they would have missed without him. He belongs to the
 * Hazlitt s study of the Italian masters during this tour,