William Hazlitt

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William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English writer remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism. Hazlitt was a promninent English literary critic, grammarian and philosopher.

Contents 1 Background 2 Childhood 3 Education 4 The Young Philosopher 5 "First Acquaintance with Poets" 6 Adulthood 7 Posthumous reputation 8 Works 9 Quotes 10 Notes 11 References 12 External links

[edit] Background

Hazlitt came from a branch of Irish Protestant stock that moved in the reign of George I from the county of Antrim to Tipperary. His father, also a William Hazlitt, went to the University of Glasgow (where he was contemporary with Adam Smith), from which he received a master's degree in 1760. Not entirely content with his Presbyterian faith, he became a Unitarian, joined their ministry, and crossed over to England, where he could minister to other Unitarians. In 1764 he was pastor at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, where in 1766 he married Grace Loftus, daughter of a recently deceased ironmonger. Of their many children, only three survived infancy. The first of these, John (later known as a portrait painter) was born in 1767 at Marshfield in Gloucestershire, where the Reverend William Hazlitt had accepted a new pastorate after his marriage. In 1770, the elder Hazlitt accepted yet another position and moved with his family to Maidstone, Kent, where his first and only surviving daughter, Margaret (usually known as "Peggy"), was born that year.^[1]

[edit] Childhood

William, the youngest of these, was born in Mitre Lane, Maidstone, in 1778. In 1780, when he was two, his family began a migratory existence that was to last several years. From Maidstone his father took them to Bandon, County Cork, Ireland; and from Bandon in 1783 to America, where Mr. Hazlitt preached, lectured, and founded the First Unitarian Church at Boston. In 1786-1787 the family returned to England and took up their abode at Wem, in Shropshire. The elder son, John, was now old enough to choose a vocation, and became a miniature-painter. The second child, Peggy, had begun to paint also, amateurishly in oils. William, aged eight – a child out of whose recollection all memories of Bandon and of America (save the taste of barberries) soon faded – took his education at home and at a local school.

[edit] Education

His father intended him for the Unitarian ministry, and in 1793 sent him to a seminary on what was then the outskirts of London, the New Unitarian College at Hackney (commonly referred to as Hackney College).^[2] He stayed there for only about two years,^[3] but during that time the young Hazlitt read widely and formed habits of independent thought and respect for the truth that remained with him for life, the tutelage at Hackney having been strongly influenced by eminent Dissenting thinkers of the day like Richard Price and Joseph Priestley.^[4]

The curriculum at Hackney included a grounding in the Greek and Latin classics, mathematics, and, of course, religion. Priestley, whom he had read and was also one of his teachers, was an impassioned commentator on political issues of the day. This, along with the turmoil in the wake of the French Revolution, sparked in Hazlitt and his classmates lively debates on these issues, as they saw their world being transformed around them. Hazlitt's thoughts on these political concerns stayed with him, becoming an important part of his thinking.^[5]

Other changes were taking place within the young Hazlitt as well. While, out of respect for his father, Hazlitt never openly broke with his religion, he suffered a loss of faith, and was forced to leave Hackney before completing his preparation for the ministry.^[6]

[edit] The Young Philosopher

Returning home, around 1795, his thoughts were directed in more secular channels, encompassing not only politics but, increasingly, modern philosophy, which he had begun to read with fascination at Hackney. He spent much of his time in intensive study of English, Scottish, and Irish thinkers like Locke, Hartley, Berkeley, and David Hume, and French thinkers like Helvétius, Condillac, Condorcet, and Baron d'Holbach. ^[7] From then on Hazlitt's goal was to become a philosopher. His thoughts were focused on man as a social and political animal, and, even more intensely, on the philosophy of mind, what would later be called psychology.

In this period he discovered Rousseau, who became one of the most important influences on the budding philosopher's thought, and Edmund Burke, whose writing style impressed him enormously.^[8] He was painstakingly working out a treatise on the "natural disinterestedness of the human mind", ^[9] meant to disprove the idea that man is naturally selfish, a fundamental concept in most of the philosophy of the day.^[10] Hazlitt's treatise was not to see the light of day for a number of years, after further reading, and after other changes had occurred to alter the course of his career, but to the end of his life he would think of himself as a philosopher.^[11]

Around 1796, Hazlitt was encouraged and inspired by a retired clergyman who had become a reformer of note, Joseph Fawcett. Hazlitt was awed by the enormous breadth of Fawcett's tastes. From Fawcett, in the words of biographer Ralph Wardle, he imbibed a love for "good fiction and impassioned writing," Fawcett being "a man of keen intelligence who did not scorn the products of the imagination or apologize for his tastes." They discussed the radical thinkers of their day, and, important for understanding the breadth and depth of Hazlitt's own taste in his later critical writings, everything literary from John Milton's Paradise Lost to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.^[12]

Somewhat earlier, he had also met William Godwin, the reformist thinker whose Political Justice took the thinking world by storm at this time. Hazlitt was never to feel entirely in sympathy with Godwin's philosophy, but it gave him much food for thought.^[13]

Besides residing with his father while trying to find his voice and work out his thoughts as a philosopher, he often in these years stayed with his older brother John, who had studied under Sir Joshua Reynolds and was following a career as a portrait painter. He also spent delighted evenings at the theatre in London then,^[14] but did not yet know how this too would be important to his later writing. Mostly at this time he led a contemplative existence, still feeling frustrated in being unable to express on paper the thoughts and feelings that churned within him.^[15] The course of this existence was now to be interrupted by the single event that, with its aftermath, had an impact on his career greater than any other.

[edit] "First Acquaintance with Poets"

In January 1798, Hazlitt encountered, preaching at the Unitarian chapel in Shrewsbury, the minister Samuel Taylor Coleridge, soon much better known as a poet, critic, and philosopher. He was dazzled. "I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres," he wrote years later in his essay "My First Acquaintance with Poets".^[16] "Poetry and Philosophy had met together. Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of religion."

Later still, long after they had parted ways, Hazlitt would speak of Coleridge as "the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius".^[17]. That Hazlitt learned to express his thoughts "in motley imagery or quaint allusion", that his understanding "ever found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge", he later wrote.^[18] In conversation afterwards, Coleridge for his part expressed interest in the younger man's germinating philosophical ideas and offered encouragement.

In April he joined Coleridge at his residence in Nether Stowey, where they both spent time with the poet William Wordsworth. Again, Hazlitt was enraptured. While he was not immediately struck by Wordsworth's appearance, when he observed the look in Wordsworth's eye as he contemplated a sunset, he reflected, "With what eyes these poets see nature!" When he read his poetry he realized that this was something entirely new, and he began to see that Wordsworth's was the mind of a true poet. At that time, the three shared a passion for the ideas of liberty and rights of man. They tramped back and forth across the countryside, talking of poetry, philosophy, and the political movements that were changing the earth. This unity of spirit was not to last, but it gave Hazlitt, just twenty years old, validation of the idea that there is much to be learned and appreciated in poetry as well as the philosophy to which he was already devoted, and the encouragement to pursue his own thinking and writing.^[19]

Meanwhile, as Hazlitt had chosen not to follow a pastoral career, and as the completion of the philosophical treatise he had been working on was still years in the future, he had to find a way of earning a living, and he decided to become a painter, a decision inspired somewhat by his brother's career. He alternated between writer and painter, proving himself proficient in both fields, until finally he decided that the financial and intellectual rewards of painting were outweighed by those of writing and he left it behind as a career.

[edit] Adulthood

Later, Hazlitt became friendly with Charles and Mary Lamb, and in 1808 he married Sarah Stoddart, who was a friend of Mary, and sister of John Stoddart, editor of The Times. They lived at Winterslow in Salisbury, but after three years he left her and began a journalistic career, writing for the Morning Chronicle, Edinburgh Review, The London Magazine,The Times, etc. He published several volumes of essays, including The Round Table and Characters of Shakespear's Plays, both in 1817. His best-known work is The Spirit of the Age (1825), a collection of portraits of his contemporaries, including Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Jeremy Bentham, and Sir Walter Scott.

Famous for never losing his revolutionary principles, Hazlitt attacked those he saw as 'apostates' with the most rigour, seeing their move towards conservatism as a personal betrayal. He felt admiration for Edmund Burke as a thinker and writer but deemed him to have lost all common sense when his politics turned more conservative. He admired the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth (he continued to quote especially Wordsworth's poetry long after he had broken off friendly contact with either); but he directed some of his most vitriolic attacks against them for having replaced the humanistic and revolutionary ideas of their earlier years with staunch support of the Establishment. His harshest criticism was reserved for the revolutionary-turned-poet-laureate Robert Southey. He became romantically attached to Sarah Walker, a maid at his lodging house, which caused him to have something of a breakdown and publish details of their relationship in an 1823 book, Liber Amoris: Or, The New Pygmalion. This was seized upon by the right-wing press and was used to destroy his distinguished journalistic career with scandal. The most vitriolic comment directed towards Hazlitt was by the essayist Thomas Love Peacock, a former supporter turned rival, who declared Liber Amoris to be the "incoherent musings of a sometime polemicist turned full-time libertine and whore-master."

Hazlitt is credited with having created the denomination Ultracrepidarianism to describe one who gives opinions on matters beyond one's knowledge.

Hazlitt put forward radical political thinking which was proto-socialist and well ahead of his time and was a strong supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte, writing a four-volume biography of him. He had his admirers, but was so against the institutions of the time that he became further and further disillusioned and removed from public life. He died in poverty on 18th September 1830 and is buried in St. Anne’s Churchyard, Soho, London.

[edit] Posthumous reputation

His works having fallen out of print, Hazlitt underwent a small decline, though in the late 1990s his reputation was reasserted by admirers and his works reprinted. Two major works then appeared,The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style by Tom Paulin in 1998 and Quarrel of the Age: the life and times of William Hazlitt by A. C. Grayling in 2000.

In 2003, following a lengthy appeal, Hazlitt's gravestone was restored in St. Anne's Churchyard, unveiled by Michael Foot [1]. A Hazlitt Society was then inaugurated.

One of Soho's fashionable hotels is named after the writer. Hazlitt's hotel located on Frith Street is one of the homes William lived in and still today still retains much of the interior he would have known so well.

[edit] Works

• An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805)
• Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth and Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817)
• Lectures on the English Poets (1818)
• Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819)
• Liber Amoris: Or, The New Pygmalion (1823)
• The Spirit of the Age (1825)
• On The Pleasure of Hating (c.1826)

[edit] Quotes

• The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

• The essence of poetry is will and passion.

• Rules and models destroy genius and art.

• Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.

• The Tory is one who is governed by sense and habit alone. He considers not what is possible, but what is real; he gives might the preference over right. He cries long life to the conqueror, and is ever strong upon the stronger side – the side of corruption and prerogative.

--from Introduction to Political Essays, 1817.

• Hazlitt writes about Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"I had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun's rays glittering in the puddles of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the way-side, crushed, bleeding lifeless; but now, bursting from the deadly bands that 'bound them,

'With Styx nine times round them,'

"my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch the golden light of other years. My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure, with longing infinite and unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge."

--from the essay "My First Acquaintance with Poets"

"For if no man can be happy in the free exercise of his reason, no wise man can be happy without it."

--from the essay "On the Periodical Essayists"

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Baker, Herschel. William Hazlitt. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962.
• Bromwich, David. Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983.
• Hazlitt, William. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Edited by P.P. Howe. 21 vols. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1930–1934.
• Maclean, Catherine Macdonald. Born Under Saturn: A Biography of William Hazlitt. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944.
• Wardle, Ralph M. Hazlitt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.

[edit] External links

• Works by William Hazlitt at Project Gutenberg
• Essays by William Hazlitt at Quotidiana.org
• Hazlitt Society official site