William Hazlitt was the most articulate observer of European Romanticism, the artistic, literary, and philosophical achievements of which shape the world we inhabit today.
The First Modern Man
Professor Duncan Wu has called William Hazlitt “the first modern man”, in the sense that he was the first journalist and critic in a society of mass media—a society in which newspapers and critical reviews circulated regularly among the entire public. But as critic and essayists Hazlitt speaks to the modern mind in ways that go beyond this historical fact. He recognized that the new society emerging around him required writing filled with forthrightness and conviction. And his own prose does not disappoint in its trenchant tone and earnest feeling.
The Animating Force of Ideas
William Hazlitt personified our contemporary conception of the principled provocateur: a witty, acerbic critic passionately dedicated to ideas. His work as a painter, a philosopher, a political reporter, a theater critic, a book reviewer, a lecturer, and an essayist gave him broad experience as an intellectual. He believed fervently that the animating force of life lay in the clash of ideas. In his book, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action, he describes an ‘idea’ as an act of perceiving the relational wholes of experience. Through ideas we take an interest in things, form valuations of them, and act with or against them as it suits our purpose. Hazlitt’s stubborn adherence to this belief can be seen in one of the many dramatic incidents in his tumultuous life. After receiving a blow to the face from a supporter of Coleridge because of an unkind review he had made of the poet’s work, Hazlitt responded, "By God sir you need not trouble yourself. I do not mind a blow sir; nothing affects me but an abstract idea."
Hazlitt made a general principle of his notion that ideas are bound up with the “mixed motives” of passionate being. Our ideas, he argues, are mediated by imagination—that is, the impression of objects as grasped by the mind—and spurred by a variety of impulses, the foremost of which is power. The primal urge for power becomes an overarching theme in much of Hazlitt’s social and cultural criticism. In his essays on life—Table Talk, The Spirit of the Age, and The Plain Speaker—he observes how power expresses itself in human will, and how each individual’s will is subject to conflict not only with the world and other wills but with itself.
Power and Conflict
Hazlitt stood witness to the great achievements and great failures of his time. He thought and wrote in the shadows of new approaches to art, poetry, and philosophy. He lived through the rise and fall of Napoleon in Europe, and he witnessed the first clamors for political reform in Britain. Through it all he never abandoned his central principle. What he saw about him were expressions of power—that is, expressions of ideas that served particular aims and interests. And his essays on life suggest his awareness of the internal and external conflicts resulting from these spiritual strivings. In “The Pleasure of Hating” (1826) he writes:
"Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men."
And in “On Cant and Hypocrisy” (1828) he writes:
"Till the intellectual faculty is destroyed…it is impossible to have all brutal depravity; till the material and physical are done away with…it is impossible to have all virtue. There must be a mixture of the two, as long as man is compounded of opposite materials, a contradiction and an eternal competition for the mastery."
These passages reflect a mind sensitive to the naturalness of juxtaposed emotions; they represent pointedly Hazlitt's ability to trace the implications and consequences of various impulses. But his essays are more than just insightful commentaries on the human condition; they also demonstrate an intelligence grappling joyfully with the idiosyncrasies of its topics while remaining alive to its own forms of expression. And it is in this sense that he is a critic for our time.
The Critic’s Task
If the realm of intellect is to be available to the public, then critical thought must be readily intelligible. Hazlitt’s practice is to define, describe, and propound until the image he wants to present is fully developed and complete. His intent is to get the reader into his perspective. He does this not to convince the reader of his ideas but to ensure that the reader understands how he judges things. Good criticism—whether of art, life, or literature—requires one to make the reader’s imagination sympathetic with one’s own. And only a familiar style and a clear demonstration of how one’s judgment encompasses the contextual wholeness of a work or idea can lead to such an outcome.
Although Hazlitt wrote in the idiom of the Romantic period, his kind of criticism is just as suitable to the modern world of letters. In his execution of the office, he has shown that the task of the critic is to exercise the intelligence of the people by getting them to understand the interrelation of their values, interests, and modes of thought. The most effective means of fulfilling this vital task is to make criticism a participative endeavor in which the reader is brought into active relation with the observations, sympathies, and assessments of the critic’s own mind. This was Hazlitt’s practice in his essays, and it can serve as a model for contemporary writers of criticism.
Sources:
- Keynes, Geoffrey, ed. Selected Essays of William Hazlitt. London: The Nonesuch Press, 1930.
- Kinnaird, John. William Hazlitt: Critic of Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.
- Paulin, Tom. The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style. London: Faber and Faber, 1998.
- Wu, Duncan. William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Wu, Duncan, ed. The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998.
Christopher Reid - Chris Reid Contributing Writer As a Naval Officer, consultant, teacher, philosopher and social scientist, I have observed the motive ...
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