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Hours in a Library, Volume 2

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Title: Hours in a Library, Volume 2

Author: Leslie Stephen


        
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Language: English

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HOURS IN A LIBRARY

VOL. II.




HOURS IN A LIBRARY

BY

LESLIE STEPHEN

_NEW EDITION, WITH ADDITIONS_

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. II.

LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1892

[_All rights reserved_]




CONTENTS

OF

THE SECOND VOLUME


                                                        PAGE

DR. JOHNSON'S WRITINGS                                     1

CRABBE                                                    33

WILLIAM HAZLITT                                           67

DISRAELI'S NOVELS                                        106

MASSINGER                                                141

FIELDING'S NOVELS                                        177

COWPER AND ROUSSEAU                                      208

THE FIRST EDINBURGH REVIEWERS                            241

WORDSWORTH'S ETHICS                                      270

LANDOR'S IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS                         308

MACAULAY                                                 343




HOURS IN A LIBRARY




_DR. JOHNSON'S WRITINGS_


A book appeared not long ago of which it was the professed object to
give to the modern generation of lazy readers the pith of Boswell's
immortal biography. I shall, for sufficient reasons, refrain from
discussing the merits of the performance. One remark, indeed, may be
made in passing. The circle of readers to whom such a book is welcome
must, of necessity, be limited. To the true lovers of Boswell it is, to
say the least, superfluous; the gentlest omissions will always mangle
some people's favourite passages, and additions, whatever skill they may
display, necessarily injure that dramatic vivacity which is one of the
great charms of the original. The most discreet of cicerones is an
intruder when we open our old favourite, and, without further magic,
retire into that delicious nook of eighteenth-century society. Upon
those, again, who cannot appreciate the infinite humour of the original,
the mere excision of the less lively pages will be thrown away. There
remains only that narrow margin of readers whose appetites, languid but
not extinct, can be titillated by the promise that they shall not have
the trouble of making their own selection. Let us wish them good
digestions, and, in spite of modern changes of fashion, more robust
taste for the future. I would still hope that to many readers Boswell
has been what he has certainly been to some, the first writer who gave
them a love of English literature, and the most charming of all
companions long after the bloom of novelty has departed. I subscribe
most cheerfully to Mr. Lewes's statement that he estimates his
acquaintances according to their estimate of Boswell. A man, indeed, may
be a good Christian, and an excellent father of a family, without loving
Johnson or Boswell, for a sense of humour is not one of the primary
virtues. But Boswell's is one of the very few books which, after many
years of familiarity, will still provoke a hearty laugh even in the
solitude of a study; and the laughter is of that kind which does one
good.

I do not wish, however, to pronounce one more eulogy upon an old friend,
but to say a few words on a question which he sometimes suggests.
Macaulay's well-known but provoking essay is more than usually lavish in
overstrained paradoxes. He has explicitly declared that Boswell wrote
one of the most charming of books because he was one of the greatest of
fools. And his remarks suggest, if they do not implicitly assert, that
Johnson wrote some of the most unreadable of books, although, if not
because, he possessed one of the most vigorous intellects of the time.
Carlyle has given a sufficient explanation of the first paradox; but the
second may justify a little further inquiry. As a general rule, the talk
of a great man is the reflection of his books. Nothing is so false as
the common saying that the presence of a distinguished writer is
generally disappointing. It exemplifies a very common delusion. People
are so impressed by the disparity which sometimes occurs, that they
take the exception for the rule. It is, of course, true that a man's
verbal utterances may differ materially from his written utterances. He
may, like Addison, be shy in company; he may, like many retired
students, be slow in collecting his thoughts; or he may, like Goldsmith,
be over-anxious to shine at all hazards. But a patient observer will
even then detect the essential identity under superficial differences;
and in the majority of cases, as in that of Macaulay himself, the
talking and the writing are palpably and almost absurdly similar. The
whole art of criticism consists in learning to know the human being who
is partially revealed to us in his spoken or his written words. Whatever
the means of communication, the problem is the same. The two methods of
inquiry may supplement each other; but their substantial agreement is
the test of their accuracy. If Johnson, as a writer, appears to us to be
a mere windbag and manufacturer of sesquipedalian verbiage, whilst, as a
talker, he appears to be one of the most genuine and deeply feeling of
men, we may be sure that our analysis has been somewhere defective. The
discrepancy is, of course, partly explained by the faults of Johnson's
style; but the explanation only removes the difficulty a degree further.
'The style is the man' is a very excellent aphorism, though some eminent
writers have lately pointed out that Buffon's original remark was_ le
style c'est de l'homme_. That only proves that, like many other good
sayings, it has been polished and brought to perfection by the process
of attrition in numerous minds, instead of being struck out at a blow by
a solitary thinker. From a purely logical point of view, Buffon may be
correct; but the very essence of an aphorism is that slight exaggeration
which makes it more biting whilst less rigidly accurate. According to
Buffon, the style might belong to a man as an acquisition rather than to
natural growth. There are parasitical writers who, in the old phrase,
have 'formed their style,' by the imitation of accepted models, and who
have, therefore, possessed it only by right of appropriation. Boswell
has a discussion as to the writers who may have served Johnson in this
capacity. But, in fact, Johnson, like all other men of strong
idiosyncrasy, formed his style as he formed his legs. The peculiarities
of his limbs were in some degree the result of conscious efforts in
walking, swimming, and 'buffeting with his books.' This development was
doubtless more fully determined by the constitution which he brought
into the world, and the circumstances under which he was brought up. And
even that queer Johnsonese, which Macaulay supposes him to have adopted
in accordance with a more definite literary theory, will probably appear
to be the natural expression of certain innate tendencies, and of the
mental atmosphere which he breathed from youth. To appreciate fairly the
strangely cumbrous form of his written speech, we must penetrate more
deeply than may at first sight seem necessary beneath the outer rind of
this literary Behemoth. The difficulty of such spiritual dissection is,
indeed, very great; but some little light may be thrown upon the subject
by following out such indications as we possess.

The talking Johnson is sufficiently familiar to us. So far as Boswell
needs an interpreter, Carlyle has done all that can be done. He has
concentrated and explained what is diffused, and often unconsciously
indicated in Boswell's pages. When reading Boswell, we are half ashamed
of his power over our sympathies. It is like turning over a portfolio
of sketches, caricatured, inadequate, and each giving only some
imperfect aspect of the original. Macaulay's smart paradoxes only
increase our perplexity by throwing the superficial contrasts into
stronger relief. Carlyle, with true imaginative insight, gives us at
once the essence of Johnson; he brings before our eyes the luminous body
of which we had previously been conscious only by a series of imperfect
images refracted through a number of distorting media. To render such a
service effectually is the highest triumph of criticism; and it would be
impertinent to say again in feebler language what Carlyle has expressed
so forcibly. We may, however, recall certain general conclusions by way
of preface to the problem which he has not expressly considered, how far
Johnson succeeded in expressing himself through his writings.

The world, as Carlyle sees it, is composed, we all know, of two classes:
there are 'the dull millions, who, as a dull flock, roll hither and
thither, whithersoever they are led,' and there are a few superior
natures who can see and can will. There are, in other words, the heroes,
and those whose highest wisdom is to be hero-worshippers. Johnson's
glory is that he belonged to the sacred band, though he could not claim
within it the highest, or even a very high, rank. In the current
dialect, therefore, he was 'nowise a clothes-horse or patent digester,
but a genuine man.' Whatever the accuracy of the general doctrine, or of
certain corollaries which are drawn from it, the application to Johnson
explains one main condition of his power. Persons of colourless
imagination may hold--nor will we dispute their verdict--that Carlyle
overcharges his lights and shades, and brings his heroes into too
startling a contrast with the vulgar herd. Yet it is undeniable that
the great bulk of mankind are transmitters rather than originators of
spiritual force. Most of us are necessarily condemned to express our
thoughts in formulas which we have learnt from others and can but
slightly tinge with our feeble personality. Nor, as a rule, are we even
consistent disciples of any one school of thought. What we call our
opinions are mere bundles of incoherent formulæ, arbitrarily stitched
together because our reasoning faculties are too dull to make
inconsistency painful. Of the vast piles of books which load our
libraries, ninety-nine hundredths and more are but printed echoes: and
it is the rarest of pleasures to say, Here is a distinct record of
impressions at first hand. We commonplace beings are hurried along in
the crowd, living from hand to mouth on such slices of material and
spiritual food as happen to drift in our direction, with little more
power of taking an independent course, or of forming any general theory,
than the polyps which are carried along by an oceanic current. Ask any
man what he thinks of the world in which he is placed: whether, for
example, it is on the whole a scene of happiness or misery, and he will
either answer by some cut-and-dried fragments of what was once wisdom,
or he will confine himself to a few incoherent details. He had a good
dinner to-day and a bad toothache yesterday, and a family affliction or
blessing the day before. But he is as incapable of summing up his
impressions as an infant of performing an operation in the differential
calculus. It is as rare as it is refreshing to find a man who can stand
on his own legs and be conscious of his own feelings, who is sturdy
enough to react as well as to transmit action, and lofty enough to raise
himself above the hurrying crowd and have some distinct belief as to
whence it is coming and whither it is going. Now Johnson, as one of the
sturdiest of mankind, had the power due to a very distinct sentiment, if
not to a very clear theory, about the world in which he lived. It had
buffeted him severely enough, and he had formed a decisive estimate of
its value. He was no man to be put off with mere phrases in place of
opinions, or to accept doctrines which were not capable of expressing
genuine emotion. To this it must be added that his emotions were as deep
and tender as they were genuine. How sacred was his love for his old and
ugly wife; how warm his sympathy wherever it could be effective; how
manly the self-respect with which he guarded his dignity through all the
temptations of Grub Street, need not be once more pointed out. Perhaps,
however, it is worth while to notice the extreme rarity of such
qualities. Many people, we think, love their fathers. Fortunately, that
is true; but in how many people is filial affection strong enough to
overpower the dread of eccentricity? How many men would have been
capable of doing penance in Uttoxeter market years after their father's
death for a long-passed act of disobedience? Most of us, again, would
have a temporary emotion of pity for an outcast lying helplessly in the
street. We should call the police, or send her in a cab to the
workhouse, or, at least, write to the _Times_ to denounce the defective
arrangements of public charity. But it is perhaps better not to ask how
many good Samaritans would take her on their shoulders to their own
homes, care for her wants, and put her into a better way of life.

In the lives of most eminent men we find much good feeling and
honourable conduct; but it is an exception, even in the case of good
men, when we find that a life has been shaped by other than the ordinary
conventions, or that emotions have dared to overflow the well-worn
channels of respectability. The love which we feel for Johnson is due
to the fact that the pivots upon which his life turned are invariably
noble motives, and not mere obedience to custom. More than one modern
writer has expressed a fraternal affection for Addison, and it is
justified by the kindly humour which breathes through his 'Essays.' But
what anecdote of that most decorous and successful person touches our
hearts or has the heroic ring of Johnson's wrestlings with adverse
fortune? Addison showed how a Christian could die--when his life has run
smoothly through pleasant places, secretaryships of state, and marriages
with countesses, and when nothing--except a few overdoses of port
wine--has shaken his nerves or ruffled his temper. A far deeper emotion
rises at the deathbed of the rugged old pilgrim, who has fought his way
to peace in spite of troubles within and without, who has been jeered in
Vanity Fair and has descended into the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
and escaped with pain and difficulty from the clutches of Giant Despair.
When the last feelings of such a man are tender, solemn, and simple, we
feel ourselves in a higher presence than that of an amiable gentleman
who simply died, as he lived, with consummate decorum.

On turning, however, from Johnson's life to his writings, from Boswell
to the 'Rambler,' it must be admitted that the shock is trying to our
nerves. The 'Rambler' has, indeed, high merits. The impression which it
made upon his own generation proves the fact; for the reputation,
however temporary, was not won by a concession to the fashions of the
day, but to the influence of a strong judgment uttering itself through
uncouth forms. The melancholy which colours its pages is the melancholy
of a noble nature. The tone of thought reminds us of Bishop Butler,
whose writings, defaced by a style even more tiresome, though less
pompous than Johnson's, have owed their enduring reputation to a
philosophical acuteness in which Johnson was certainly very deficient.
Both of these great men, however, impress us by their deep sense of the
evils under which humanity suffers, and their rejection of the
superficial optimism of the day. Butler's sadness, undoubtedly, is that
of a recluse, and Johnson's that of a man of the world; but the
sentiment is fundamentally the same. It may be added, too, that here, as
elsewhere, Johnson speaks with the sincerity of a man drawing upon his
own experience. He announces himself as a scholar thrust out upon the
world rather by necessity than choice; and a large proportion of the
papers dwell upon the various sufferings of the literary class. Nobody
could speak more feelingly of those sufferings, as no one had a closer
personal acquaintance with them. But allowing to Johnson whatever credit
is due to the man who performs one more variation on the old theme,
_Vanitas vanitatum_, we must in candour admit that the 'Rambler' has the
one unpardonable fault: it is unreadable.

What an amazing turn it shows for commonplaces! That life is short, that
marriages from mercenary motives produce unhappiness, that different men
are virtuous in different degrees, that advice is generally ineffectual,
that adversity has its uses, that fame is liable to suffer from
detraction;--these and a host of other such maxims are of the kind upon
which no genius and no depth of feeling can confer a momentary interest.
Here and there, indeed, the pompous utterance invests them with an
unlucky air of absurdity. 'Let no man from this time,' is the comment in
one of his stories, 'suffer his felicity to depend on the death of his
aunt.' Every actor, of course, uses the same dialect. A gay young
gentleman tells us that he used to amuse his companions by giving them
notice of his friends' oddities. 'Every man,' he says, 'has some
habitual contortion of body, or established mode of expression, which
never fails to excite mirth if it be pointed out to notice. By
premonition of these particularities, I secured our pleasantry.' The
feminine characters, Flirtillas, and Cleoras, and Euphelias, and
Penthesileas, are, if possible, still more grotesque. Macaulay remarks
that he wears the petticoat with as ill a grace as Falstaff himself. The
reader, he thinks, will cry out with Sir Hugh, 'I like not when a 'oman
has a great peard! I spy a great peard under her muffler.' Oddly enough
Johnson gives the very same quotation; and goes on to warn his supposed
correspondents that Phyllis must send no more letters from the Horse
Guards; and that Belinda must 'resign her pretensions to female elegance
till she has lived three weeks without hearing the politics of Button's
Coffee House.' The Doctor was probably sensible enough of his own
defects. And yet there is a still more wearisome set of articles. In
emulation of the precedent set by Addison, Johnson indulges in the
dreariest of allegories. Criticism, we are told, was the eldest daughter
of Labour and Truth, but at last resigned in favour of Time, and left
Prejudice and False Taste to reign in company with Fraud and Mischief.
Then we have the genealogy of Wit and Learning, and of Satire, the Son
of Wit and Malice, and an account of their various quarrels, and the
decision of Jupiter. Neither are the histories of such semi-allegorical
personages as Almamoulin, the son of Nouradin, or of Anningait and Ayut,
the Greenland lovers, much more refreshing to modern readers. That
Johnson possessed humour of no mean order, we know from Boswell; but no
critic could have divined his power from the clumsy gambols in which he
occasionally recreates himself. Perhaps his happiest effort is a
dissertation upon the advantage of living in garrets; but the humour
struggles and gasps dreadfully under the weight of words. 'There are,'
he says, 'some who would continue blockheads' (the Alpine Club was not
yet founded), 'even on the summit of the Andes or the Peak of Teneriffe.
But let not any man be considered as unimprovable till this potent
remedy has been tried; for perhaps he was found to be great only in a
garret, as the joiner of Aretæus was rational in no other place but his
own shop.'

How could a man of real power write such unendurable stuff? Or how,
indeed, could any man come to embody his thoughts in the style of which
one other sentence will be a sufficient example? As it is afterwards
nearly repeated, it may be supposed to have struck his fancy. The
remarks of the philosophers who denounce temerity are, he says, 'too
just to be disputed and too salutary to be rejected; but there is
likewise some danger lest timorous prudence should be inculcated till
courage and enterprise are wholly repressed and the mind congested in
perpetual inactivity by the fatal influence of frigorifick wisdom.' Is
there not some danger, we ask, that the mind will be benumbed into
perpetual torpidity by the influence of this soporific sapience? It is
still true, however, that this Johnsonese, so often burlesqued and
ridiculed, was, as far as we can judge, a genuine product. Macaulay says
that it is more offensive than the mannerism of Milton or Burke, because
it is a mannerism adopted on principle and sustained by constant effort.
Facts do not confirm the theory. Milton's prose style seems to be the
result of a conscious effort to run English into classical moulds.
Burke's mannerism does not appear in his early writings, and we can
trace its development from the imitation of Bolingbroke to the last
declamation against the Revolution. But Johnson seems to have written
Johnsonese from his cradle. In his first original composition, the
preface to Father Lobo's 'Abyssinia,' the style is as distinctive as in
the 'Rambler.' The Parliamentary reports in the 'Gentleman's Magazine'
make Pitt and Fox[1] express sentiments which are probably their own in
language which is as unmistakably Johnson's. It is clear that his style,
good or bad, was the same from his earliest efforts. It is only in his
last book, the 'Lives of the Poets,' that the mannerism, though equally
marked, is so far subdued as to be tolerable. What he himself called his
habit of using 'too big words and too many of them' was no affectation,
but as much the result of his special idiosyncrasy as his queer
gruntings and twitchings. Sir Joshua Reynolds indeed maintained, and we
may believe so attentive an observer, that his strange physical
contortions were the result of bad habit, not of actual disease.
Johnson, he said, could sit as still as other people when his attention
was called to it. And possibly, if he had tried, he might have avoided
the fault of making 'little fishes talk like whales.' But how did the
bad habits arise? According to Boswell, Johnson professed to have
'formed his style' partly upon Sir W. Temple, and on 'Chambers's
Proposal for his Dictionary.' The statement was obviously
misinterpreted: but there is a glimmering of truth in the theory that
the 'style was formed'--so far as those words have any meaning--on the
'giants of the seventeenth century,' and especially upon Sir Thomas
Browne. Johnson's taste, in fact, had led him to the study of writers
in many ways congenial to him. His favourite book, as we know, was
Burton's 'Anatomy of Melancholy.' The pedantry of the older school did
not repel him; the weighty thought rightly attracted him; and the more
complex structure of sentence was perhaps a pleasant contrast to an ear
saturated with the Gallicised neatness of Addison and Pope. Unluckily,
the secret of the old majestic cadence was hopelessly lost. Johnson,
though spiritually akin to the giants, was the firmest ally and subject
of the dwarfish dynasty which supplanted them. The very faculty of
hearing seems to change in obedience to some mysterious law at different
stages of intellectual development; and that which to one generation is
delicious music is to another a mere droning of bagpipes or the grinding
of monotonous barrel-organs.

Assuming that a man can find perfect satisfaction in the versification
of the 'Essay on Man,' we can understand his saying of 'Lycidas,' that
'the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers
unpleasing.' In one of the 'Ramblers' we are informed that the accent in
blank verse ought properly to rest upon every second syllable throughout
the whole line. A little variety must, he admits, be allowed to avoid
satiety; but all lines which do not go in the steady jog-trot of
alternate beats as regularly as the piston of a steam engine, are more
or less defective. This simple-minded system naturally makes wild work
with the poetry of the 'mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies.' Milton's
harsh cadences are indeed excused on the odd ground that he who was
'vindicating the ways of God to man' might have been condemned for
'lavishing much of his attention upon syllables and sounds.' Moreover,
the poor man did his best by introducing sounding proper names, even
when they 'added little music to his poem:' an example of this feeble,
though well-meant expedient, being the passage about the moon, which--

                  The Tuscan artist views,
    At evening, from the top of Fiesole
    Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, &c.

This profanity passed at the time for orthodoxy. But the misfortune was,
that Johnson, unhesitatingly subscribing to the rules of Queen Anne's
critics, is always instinctively feeling after the grander effects of
the old school. Nature prompts him to the stateliness of Milton, whilst
Art orders him to deal out long and short syllables alternately, and to
make them up in parcels of ten, and then tie the parcels together in
pairs by the help of a rhyme. The natural utterance of a man of strong
perceptions, but of unwieldy intellect, of a melancholy temperament, and
capable of very deep, but not vivacious emotions, would be in stately
and elaborate phrases. His style was not more distinctly a work of art
than the style of Browne or Milton, but, unluckily, it was a work of bad
art. He had the misfortune, not so rare as it may sound, to be born in
the wrong century; and is, therefore, a giant in fetters; the amplitude
of stride is still there, but it is checked into mechanical regularity.
A similar phenomenon is observable in other writers of the time. The
blank verse of Young, for example, is generally set to Pope's tune with
the omission of the rhymes, whilst Thomson, revolting more or less
consciously against the canons of his time, too often falls into mere
pompous mouthing. Shaftesbury, in the previous generation, trying to
write poetical prose, becomes as pedantic as Johnson, though in a
different style; and Gibbon's mannerism is a familiar example of a
similar escape from a monotonous simplicity into awkward complexity.
Such writers are like men who have been chilled by what Johnson would
call the 'frigorifick' influence of the classicism of their fathers, and
whose numbed limbs move stiffly and awkwardly in a first attempt to
regain the old liberty. The form, too, of the 'Rambler' is unfortunate.
Johnson has always Addison before his eyes; to whom it was formerly the
fashion to compare him for the same excellent reason which has recently
suggested comparisons between Dickens and Thackeray--namely, that their
works were published in the same external shape. Unluckily, Johnson gave
too much excuse for the comparison by really imitating Addison. He has
to make allegories, and to give lively sketches of feminine
peculiarities, and to ridicule social foibles of which he was, at most,
a distant observer. The inevitable consequence is, that though here and
there we catch a glimpse of the genuine man, we are, generally, too much
provoked by the awkwardness of his costume to be capable of enjoying, or
even reading him.

In many of his writings, however, Johnson manages, almost entirely, to
throw off these impediments. In his deep capacity for sympathy and
reverence, we recognise some of the elements that go to the making of a
poet. He is always a man of intuitions rather than of discursive
intellect; often keen of vision, though wanting in analytical power. For
poetry, indeed, as it is often understood now, or even as it was
understood by Pope, he had little enough qualification. He had not the
intellectual vivacity implied in the marvellously neat workmanship of
Pope, and still less the delight in all natural and artistic beauty
which we generally take to be essential to poetic excellence. His
contempt for 'Lycidas' is sufficiently significant upon that head. Still
more characteristic is the incapacity to understand Spenser, which
comes out incidentally in his remarks upon some of those imitations,
which even in the middle of the eighteenth century showed that
sensibility to the purest form of poetry was not by any means extinct
amongst us. But there is a poetry, though we sometimes seem to forget
it, which is the natural expression of deep moral sentiment; and of this
Johnson has written enough to reveal very genuine power. The touching
verses upon the death of Levett are almost as pathetic as Cowper; and
fragments of the two imitations of Juvenal have struck deep enough to be
not quite forgotten. We still quote the lines about pointing a moral and
adorning a tale, which conclude a really noble passage. We are too often
reminded of his melancholy musings over the

    Fears of the brave and follies of the wise,

and a few of the concluding lines of the 'Vanity of Human Wishes,' in
which he answers the question whether man must of necessity

    Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate,

in helplessness and ignorance, may have something of a familiar ring. We
are to give thanks, he says,

    For love, which scarce collective man can fill;
    For patience, sovereign o'er transmuted ill;
    For faith, that, panting for a happier seat,
    Counts death kind nature's signal for retreat;
    These goods for man, the laws of heaven ordain,
    These goods He grants, who grants the power to gain,
    With these celestial wisdom calms the mind,
    And makes the happiness she does not find.

These lines, and many others which might be quoted, are noble in
expression, as well as lofty and tender in feeling. Johnson, like
Wordsworth, or even more deeply than Wordsworth, had felt all the
'heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world;' and,
though he stumbles a little in the narrow limits of his versification,
he bears himself nobly, and manages to put his heart into his poetry.
Coleridge's paraphrase of the well-known lines, 'Let observation with
extensive observation, observe mankind from China to Peru,' would
prevent us from saying that he had thrown off his verbiage. He has not
the felicity of Goldsmith's 'Traveller,' though he wrote one of the best
couplets in that admirable poem; but his ponderous lines show genuine
vigour, and can be excluded from poetry only by the help of an arbitrary
classification.

The fullest expression, however, of Johnson's feeling is undoubtedly to
be found in 'Rasselas.' The inevitable comparison with Voltaire's
'Candide,' which, by an odd coincidence, appeared almost simultaneously,
suggests some curious reflections. The resemblance between the moral of
the two books is so strong that, as Johnson remarked, it would have been
difficult not to suppose that one had given a hint to the other but for
the chronological difficulty. The contrast, indeed, is as marked as the
likeness. 'Candide' is not adapted for family reading, whereas
'Rasselas' might be a textbook for young ladies studying English in a
convent. 'Candide' is a marvel of clearness and vivacity; whereas to
read 'Rasselas' is about as exhilarating as to wade knee-deep through a
sandy desert. Voltaire and Johnson, however, the great sceptic and the
last of the true old Tories, coincide pretty well in their view of the
world, and in the remedy which they suggest. The world is, they agree,
full of misery, and the optimism which would deny the reality of the
misery is childish. _Il faut cultiver notre jardin_ is the last word of
'Candide,' and Johnson's teaching, both here and elsewhere, may be
summed up in the words 'Work, and don't whine.' It need not be
considered here, nor, perhaps, is it quite plain, what speculative
conclusions Voltaire meant to be drawn from his teaching. The
peculiarity of Johnson is, that he is apparently indifferent to any such
conclusion. A dogmatic assertion, that the world is on the whole a scene
of misery, may be pressed into the service of different philosophies.
Johnson asserted the opinion resolutely, both in writing and in
conversation, but apparently never troubled himself with any inferences
but such as have a directly practical tendency. He was no
'speculatist'--a word which now strikes us as having an American twang,
but which was familiar to the lexicographer. His only excursion to the
borders of such regions was in the very forcible review of Soane Jenyns,
who had made a jaunty attempt to explain the origin of evil by the help
of a few of Pope's epigrams. Johnson's sledge-hammer smashes his flimsy
platitudes to pieces with an energy too good for such a foe. For
speculation, properly so called, there was no need. The review, like
'Rasselas,' is simply a vigorous protest against the popular attempt to
make things pleasant by a feeble dilution of the most watery kind of
popular teaching. He has no trouble in remarking that the evils of
poverty are not alleviated by calling it 'want of riches,' and that
there is a poverty which involves want of necessaries. The offered
consolation, indeed, came rather awkwardly from the elegant country
gentleman to the poor scholar who had just known by experience what it
was to live upon fourpence-halfpenny a day. Johnson resolutely looks
facts in the face, and calls ugly things by their right names. Men, he
tells us over and over again, are wretched, and there is no use in
denying it. This doctrine appears in his familiar talk, and even in the
papers which he meant to be light reading. He begins the prologue to a
comedy with the words--

    Pressed with the load of life, the weary mind
    Surveys the general toil of human kind.

In the 'Life of Savage' he makes the common remark that the lives of
many of the greatest teachers of mankind have been miserable. The
explanation to which he inclines is that they have not been more
miserable than their neighbours, but that their misery has been more
conspicuous. His melancholy view of life may have been caused simply by
his unfortunate constitution; for everybody sees in the disease of his
own liver a disorder of the universe; but it was also intensified by the
natural reaction of a powerful nature against the fluent optimism of the
time, which expressed itself in Pope's aphorism, Whatever is, is right.
The strongest men of the time revolted against that attempt to cure a
deep-seated disease by a few fine speeches. The form taken by Johnson's
revolt is characteristic. His nature was too tender and too manly to
incline to Swift's misanthropy. Men might be wretched, but he would not
therefore revile them as filthy Yahoos. He was too reverent and cared
too little for abstract thought to share the scepticism of Voltaire. In
this miserable world the one worthy object of ambition is to do one's
duty, and the one consolation deserving the name is to be found in
religion. That Johnson's religious opinions sometimes took the form of
rather grotesque superstition may be true; and it is easy enough to
ridicule some of its manifestations. He took the creed of his day
without much examination of the evidence upon which its dogmas rested;
but a writer must be thoughtless indeed who should be more inclined to
laugh at his superficial oddities, than to admire the reverent spirit
and the brave self-respect with which he struggled through a painful
life. The protest of 'Rasselas' against optimism is therefore widely
different from the protest of Voltaire. The deep and genuine feeling of
the Frenchman is concealed under smart assaults upon the dogmas of
popular theology; the Englishman desires to impress upon us the futility
of all human enjoyments, with a view to deepen the solemnity of our
habitual tone of thought. It is true, indeed, that the evil is dwelt
upon more forcibly than the remedy. The book is all the more impressive.
We are almost appalled by the gloomy strength which sees so forcibly the
misery of the world and rejects so unequivocally all the palliatives of
sentiment and philosophy. The melancholy is intensified by the ponderous
style, which suggests a man weary of a heavy burden. The air seems to be
filled with what Johnson once called 'inspissated gloom.' 'Rasselas,'
one may say, has a narrow escape of being a great book, though it is ill
calculated for the hasty readers of to-day. Indeed, the defects are
serious enough. The class of writing to which it belongs demands a
certain dramatic picturesqueness to point the moral effectively. Not
only the long-winded sentences, but the slow evolution of thought and
the deliberation with which he works out his pictures of misery, make
the general effect dull beside such books as 'Candide' or 'Gulliver's
Travels.' A touch of epigrammatic exaggeration is very much needed; and
yet anybody who has the courage to read it through will admit that
Johnson is not an unworthy guide into those gloomy regions of
imagination which we all visit sometimes, and which it is as well to
visit in good company.

After his fashion, Johnson is a fair representative of Greatheart. His
melancholy is distinguished from that of feebler men by the strength of
the conviction that 'it will do no good to whine.' We know his view of
the great prophet of the Revolutionary school. 'Rousseau,' he said, to
Boswell's astonishment, 'is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a
sentence for his transportation than that of any felon who has gone from
the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in
the plantations.' That is a fine specimen of the good Johnsonese
prejudices of which we hear so much; and, of course, it is easy to infer
that Johnson was an ignorant bigot, who had not in any degree taken the
measure of the great moving forces of his time. Nothing, indeed, can be
truer than that Johnson cared very little for the new gospel of the
rights of man. His truly British contempt for all such fancies ('for
anything I see,' he once said, 'foreigners are fools') is one of his
strongest characteristics. Now, Rousseau and his like took a view of the
world as it was quite as melancholy as Johnson's. They inferred that it
ought to be turned upside down, assured that the millennium would begin
as soon as a few revolutionary dogmas were accepted. All their remedies
appeared to the excellent Doctor as so much of that cant of which it was
a man's first duty to clear his mind. The evils of life were far too
deeply seated to be caused or cured by kings or demagogues. One of the
most popular commonplaces of the day was the mischief of luxury. That we
were all on the high road to ruin on account of our wealth, our
corruption, and the growth of the national debt, was the text of any
number of political agitators. The whole of this talk was, to his mind,
so much whining and cant. Luxury did no harm, and the mass of the
people, as indeed was in one sense obvious enough, had only too little
of it. The pet 'state of nature' of theorists was a silly figment. The
genuine savage was little better than an animal; and a savage woman,
whose contempt for civilised life had prompted her to escape to the
forest, was simply a 'speaking cat.' The natural equality of mankind was
mere moonshine. So far is it from being true, he says, that no two
people can be together for half an hour without one acquiring an evident
superiority over the other. Subordination is an essential element of
human happiness. A Whig stinks in his nostrils because to his eye modern
Whiggism is 'a negation of all principles.' As he said of Priestley's
writings, it unsettles everything and settles nothing. 'He is a cursed
Whig, a _bottomless_ Whig as they all are now,' was his description
apparently of Burke. Order, in fact, is a vital necessity; what
particular form it may take matters comparatively little; and therefore
all revolutionary dogmas were chimerical as an attack upon the
inevitable conditions of life, and mischievous so far as productive of
useless discontent. We need not ask what mixture of truth and falsehood
there may be in these principles. Of course, a Radical, or even a
respectable Whig, like Macaulay, who believed in the magical efficacy of
the British Constitution, might shriek or laugh at such doctrine.
Johnson's political pamphlets, besides the defects natural to a writer
who was only a politician by accident, advocate the most retrograde
doctrines. Nobody at the present day thinks that the Stamp Act was an
admirable or justifiable measure; or would approve of telling the
Americans that they ought to have been grateful for their long exemption
instead of indignant at the imposition. 'We do not put a calf into the
plough; we wait till he is an ox'--was not a judicious taunt. He was
utterly wrong; and, if everybody who is utterly wrong in a political
controversy deserves unmixed contempt, there is no more to be said for
him. We might indeed argue that Johnson was in some ways entitled to the
sympathy of enlightened people. His hatred of the Americans was
complicated by his hatred of slave-owners. He anticipated Lincoln in
proposing the emancipation of the negroes as a military measure. His
uniform hatred for the slave trade scandalised poor Boswell, who held
that its abolition would be equivalent to 'shutting the gates of mercy
on mankind.' His language about the blundering tyranny of the English
rule in Ireland would satisfy Mr. Froude, though he would hardly have
loved a Home Ruler. He denounces the frequency of capital punishment and
the harshness of imprisonment for debt, and he invokes a compassionate
treatment of the outcasts of our streets as warmly as the more
sentimental Goldsmith. His conservatism may be at times obtuse, but it
is never of the cynical variety. He hates cruelty and injustice as
righteously as he hates anarchy. Indeed, Johnson's contempt for mouthing
agitators of the Wilkes and Junius variety is one which may be shared by
most thinkers who would not accept his principles. There is a vigorous
passage in the 'False Alarm' which is scarcely unjust to the patriots of
the day. He describes the mode in which petitions are generally got up.
They are sent from town to town, and the people flock to see what is to
be sent to the king. 'One man signs because he hates the Papists;
another because he has vowed destruction to the turnpikes; one because
it will vex the parson; another because he owes his landlord nothing;
one because he is rich; another because he is poor; one to show that he
is not afraid, and another to show that he can write.' The people, he
thinks, are as well off as they are likely to be under any form of
government; and grievances about general warrants or the rights of
juries in libel cases are not really felt so long as they have enough to
eat and drink and wear. The error, we may probably say, was less in the
contempt for a very shallow agitation than in the want of perception
that deeper causes of discontent were accumulating in the background.
Wilkes in himself was a worthless demagogue; but Wilkes was the straw
carried by the rising tide of revolutionary sentiment, to which Johnson
was entirely blind. Yet whatever we may think of his political
philosophy, the value of these solid sturdy prejudices is undeniable. To
the fact that Johnson was the typical representative of a large class of
Englishmen, we owe it that the Society of Rights did not develop into a
Jacobin Club. The fine phrases on which Frenchmen became intoxicated
never turned the heads of men impervious to abstract theories and
incapable of dropping substances for shadows. There are evils in each
temperament; but it is as well that some men should carry into politics
that rooted contempt for whining which lay so deep in Johnson's nature.
He scorned the sickliness of the Rousseau school as, in spite of his
constitutional melancholy, he scorned valetudinarianism whether of the
bodily or the spiritual order. He saw evil enough in the world to be
heartily, at times too roughly, impatient of all fine ladies who made a
luxury of grief or of demagogues who shrieked about theoretical
grievances which did not sensibly affect the happiness of one man in a
thousand. The lady would not have time to nurse her sorrows if she had
been a washerwoman; the grievances with which the demagogues yelled
themselves hoarse could hardly be distinguished amidst the sorrows of
the vast majority condemned to keep starvation at bay by unceasing
labour. His incapacity for speculation makes his pamphlets worthless
beside Burke's philosophical discourses; but the treatment, if wrong and
defective on the theoretical side, is never contemptible. Here, as
elsewhere, he judges by his intuitive aversions. He rejects too hastily
whatever seems insipid or ill-flavoured to his spiritual appetite. Like
all the shrewd and sensible part of mankind he condemns as mere
moonshine what may be really the first faint dawn of a new daylight. But
then his intuitions are noble, and his fundamental belief is the vital
importance of order, of religion, and of morality, coupled with a
profound conviction, surely not erroneous, that the chief sources of
human suffering lie far deeper than any of the remedies proposed by
constitution-mongers and fluent theorists. The literary version of these
prejudices or principles is given most explicitly in the 'Lives of the
Poets'--the book which is now the most readable of Johnson's
performances, and which most frequently recalls his conversational
style. Indeed, it is a thoroughly admirable book, and but for one or two
defects might enjoy a much more decided popularity. It is full of shrewd
sense and righteous as well as keen estimates of men and things. The
'Life of Savage,' written in earlier times, is the best existing
portrait of that large class of authors who, in Johnson's phrase, 'hung
loose upon society' in the days of the Georges. The Lives of Pope,
Dryden, and others have scarcely been superseded, though much fuller
information has since come to light; and they are all well worth
reading. But the criticism, like the politics, is woefully out of date.
Johnson's division between the shams and the realities deserves all
respect in both cases, but in both cases he puts many things on the
wrong side of the dividing line. His hearty contempt for sham pastorals
and sham love-poetry will be probably shared by modern readers. 'Who
will hear of sheep and goats and myrtle bowers and purling rivulets
through five acts? Such scenes please barbarians in the dawn of
literature, and children in the dawn of life, but will be for the most
part thrown away as men grow wise and nations grow learned.' But
elsewhere he blunders into terrible misapprehensions. Where he errs by
simply repeating the accepted rules of the Pope school, he for once
talks mere second-hand nonsense. But his independent judgments are
interesting even when erroneous. His unlucky assault upon 'Lycidas,'
already noticed, is generally dismissed with a pitying shrug of the
shoulders. 'Among the flocks and copses and flowers appear the heathen
deities; Jove and Phoebus, Neptune and Æolus, with a long train of
mythological imagery, such as a college easily supplies. Nothing can
less display knowledge, or less exercise invention, than to tell how a
shepherd has lost his companion, and must now feed his flocks alone; how
one god asks another god what has become of Lycidas, and how neither god
can tell. He who thus grieves can excite no sympathy; he who thus
praises will confer no honour.'

Of course every tyro in criticism has his answer ready; he can discourse
about the æsthetic tendencies of the _Renaissance_ period, and explain
the necessity of placing one's self at a writer's point of view, and
entering into the spirit of the time. He will add, perhaps, that
'Lycidas' is a test of poetical feeling, and that he who does not
appreciate its exquisite melody has no music in his soul. The same
writer who will tell us all this, and doubtless with perfect truth,
would probably have adopted Pope or Johnson's theory with equal
confidence if he had lived in the last century. 'Lycidas' repelled
Johnson by incongruities, which, from his point of view, were certainly
offensive. Most modern readers, I will venture to suggest, feel the same
annoyances, though they have not the courage to avow them freely. If
poetry is to be judged exclusively by the simplicity and force with
which it expresses sincere emotion, 'Lycidas' would hardly convince us
of Milton's profound sorrow for the death of King, and must be condemned
accordingly. To the purely pictorial or musical effects of a poem
Johnson was nearly blind; but that need not suggest a doubt as to the
sincerity of his love for the poetry which came within the range of his
own sympathies. Every critic is in effect criticising himself as well as
his author; and I confess that to my mind an obviously sincere record of
impressions, however one-sided they may be, is infinitely refreshing, as
revealing at least the honesty of the writer. The ordinary run of
criticism generally implies nothing but the extreme desire of the author
to show that he is open to the very last new literary fashion. I should
welcome a good assault upon Shakespeare which was not prompted by a love
of singularity; and there are half-a-dozen popular idols--I have not the
courage to name them--a genuine attack upon whom I could witness with
entire equanimity, not to say some complacency. If Johnson's blunder in
this case implied sheer stupidity, one can only say that honest
stupidity is a much better thing than clever insincerity or fluent
repetition of second-hand dogmas. But, in fact, this dislike of
'Lycidas,' and a good many instances of critical incapacity might be
added, is merely a misapplication of a very sound principle. The hatred
of cant and humbug and affectation of all vanity is a most salutary
ingredient even in poetical criticism. Johnson, with his natural
ignorance of that historical method, the exaltation of which threatens
to become a part of our contemporary cant, made the pardonable blunder
of supposing that what would have been gross affectation in Gray must
have been affectation in Milton. His ear had been too much corrupted by
the contemporary school to enable him to recognise beauties which would
even have shone through some conscious affectation. He had the rare
courage--for, even then, Milton was one of the tabooed poets--to say
what he thought as forcibly as he could say it; and he has suffered the
natural punishment of plain speaking. It must, of course, be admitted
that a book embodying such principles is doomed to become more or less
obsolete, like his political pamphlets. And yet, as significant of the
writer's own character, as containing many passages of sound judgment,
expressed in forcible language, it is still, if not a great book, really
impressive within the limits of its capacity.

After this imperfect survey of Johnson's writings, it only remains to be
noticed that all the most prominent peculiarities are the very same
which give interest to his spoken utterances. The doctrine is the same,
though the preacher's manner has changed. His melancholy is not so
heavy-eyed and depressing in his talk, for we catch him at moments of
excitement; but it is there, and sometimes breaks out emphatically and
unexpectedly. The prospect of death often clouds his mind, and he bursts
into tears when he thinks of his past sufferings. His hearty love of
truth, and uncompromising hatred of cant in all its innumerable
transmutations, prompt half his most characteristic sayings. His queer
prejudices take a humorous form, and give a delightful zest to his
conversation. His contempt for abstract speculation comes out when he
vanquishes Berkeley, not with a grin, but by 'striking his foot with
mighty force against a large stone.' His arguments, indeed, never seem
to have owed much to such logic as implies systematic and continuous
thought. He scarcely waits till his pistol misses fire to knock you down
with the butt-end. The merit of his best sayings is not that they
compress an argument into a phrase, but that they are vivid expressions
of an intuitive judgment. In other words, they are always humorous
rather than witty. He holds his own belief with so vigorous a grasp that
all argumentative devices for loosening it seem to be thrown away. As
Boswell says, he is through your body in an instant without any
preliminary parade; he gives a deadly lunge, but cares little for skill
of fence. 'We know we are free and there's an end of it,' is his
characteristic summary of a perplexed bit of metaphysics; and he would
evidently have no patience to wander through the labyrinths in which men
like Jonathan Edwards delighted to perplex themselves. We should have
been glad to see a fuller report of one of those conversations in which
Burke 'wound into a subject like a serpent,' and contrast his method
with Johnson's downright hitting. Boswell had not the power, even if he
had the will, to give an adequate account of such a 'wit combat.'

That such a mind should express itself most forcibly in speech is
intelligible enough. Conversation was to him not merely a contest, but a
means of escape from himself. 'I may be cracking my joke,' he said to
Boswell,'and cursing the sun: Sun, how I hate thy beams!' The phrase
sounds exaggerated, but it was apparently his settled conviction that
the only remedy for melancholy, except indeed the religious remedy, was
in hard work or in the rapture of conversational strife. His little
circle of friends called forth his humour as the House of Commons
excited Chatham's eloquence; and both of them were inclined to mouth too
much when deprived of the necessary stimulus. Chatham's set speeches
were as pompous as Johnson's deliberate writing. Johnson and Chatham
resemble the chemical bodies which acquire entirely new properties when
raised beyond a certain degree of temperature. Indeed, we frequently
meet touches of the conversational Johnson in his controversial writing.
'Taxation no Tyranny' is at moments almost as pithy as Swift, though the
style is never so simple. The celebrated Letter to Chesterfield, and the
letter in which he tells MacPherson that he will not be 'deterred from
detecting what he thinks a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian,' are as
good specimens of the smashing repartee as anything in Boswell's
reports. Nor, indeed, does his pomposity sink to mere verbiage so often
as might be supposed. It is by no means easy to translate his ponderous
phrases into simple words without losing some of their meaning. The
structure of the sentences is compact, though they are too elaborately
balanced and stuffed with superfluous antitheses. The language might be
simpler, but it is not a mere sham aggregation of words. His written
style, however faulty in other respects, is neither slipshod nor
ambiguous, and passes into his conversational style by imperceptible
degrees. The radical identity is intelligible, though the superficial
contrast is certainly curious. We may perhaps say that his century,
unfavourable to him as a writer, gave just what he required for talking.
If, as is sometimes said, the art of conversation is disappearing, it is
because society has become too large and diffuse. The good talker, as
indeed the good artist of every kind, depends upon the tacit
co-operation of the social medium. The chorus, as Johnson has himself
shown very well in one of the 'Ramblers,' is quite as essential as the
main performer. Nobody talks well in London, because everybody has
constantly to meet a fresh set of interlocutors, and is as much put out
as a musician who has to be always learning a new instrument. A literary
dictator has ceased to be a possibility, so far as direct personal
influence is concerned. In the club, Johnson knew how every blow would
tell, and in the rapid thrust and parry dropped the heavy style which
muffled his utterances in print. He had to deal with concrete
illustrations, instead of expanding into platitudinous generalities. The
obsolete theories which impair the value of his criticism and his
politics, become amusing in the form of pithy sayings, though they weary
us when asserted in formal expositions. His greatest literary effort,
the 'Dictionary,' has of necessity become antiquated in use, and, in
spite of the intellectual vigour indicated, can hardly be commended for
popular reading. And thus but for the inimitable Boswell, it must be
admitted that Johnson would probably have sunk very deeply into
oblivion. A few good sayings would have been preserved by Mrs. Thrale
and others, or have been handed down by tradition, and doubtless
assigned in process of time to Sydney Smith and other conversational
celebrities. A few couplets from the 'Vanity of Human Wishes' would not
yet have been submerged, and curious readers would have recognised the
power of 'Rasselas,' and been delighted with some shrewd touches in the
'Lives of the Poets.' But with all desire to magnify critical insight,
it must be admitted that that man would have shown singular penetration,
and been regarded as an eccentric commentator, who had divined the
humour and the fervour of mind which lay hid in the remains of the huge
lexicographer. And yet when we have once recognised his power, we can
see it everywhere indicated in his writings, though by an unfortunate
fatality the style or the substance was always so deeply affected by the
faults of the time, that the product is never thoroughly sound. His
tenacious conservatism caused him to cling to decaying materials for the
want of anything better, and he has suffered the natural penalty. He was
a great force half wasted, so far as literature was concerned, because
the fashionable costume of the day hampered the free exercises of his
powers, and because the only creeds to which he could attach himself
were in the phase of decline and inanition. A century earlier or later
he might have succeeded in expressing himself through books as well as
through his talk; but it is not given to us to choose the time of our
birth, and some very awkward consequences follow.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See, for example, the great debate on February 13, 1741.




_CRABBE_


It is nearly a century since George Crabbe, then a young man of
five-and-twenty, put three pounds in his pocket and started from his
native town of Aldborough, with a box of clothes and a case of surgical
instruments, to make his fortune in London. Few men have attempted that
adventure with less promising prospects. Any sensible adviser would have
told him to prefer starvation in his native village to starvation in the
back lanes of London. The adviser would, perhaps, have been vexed, but
would not have been confuted, by Crabbe's good fortune. We should still
recommend a youth not to jump into a river, though, of a thousand who
try the experiment, one may happen to be rescued by a benevolent
millionaire, and be put in the road to fortune. The chances against
Crabbe were enormous. Literature, considered as a trade, is a good deal
better at the present day than it was towards the end of the last
century, and yet anyone who has an opportunity of comparing the failures
with the successes, would be more apt to quote Chatterton than Crabbe as
a precedent for youthful aspirants. Crabbe, indeed, might say for
himself that literature was the only path open to him. His father was
collector of salt duties at Aldborough, a position, as one may imagine,
of no very great emolument. He had, however, given his son the chance of
acquiring a smattering of 'scholarship,' in the sense in which that
word is used by the less educated lower classes. To the slender store of
learning acquired in a cheap country school, the lad managed to add such
medical training as could be picked up during an apprenticeship in an
apothecary's shop. With this provision of knowledge he tried to obtain
practice in his native town. He failed to get any patients of the paying
variety. Crabbe was clumsy and absent-minded to the end of his life. He
had, moreover, a taste for botany, and the shrewd inhabitants of
Aldborough, with that perverse tendency to draw inferences which is
characteristic of people who cannot reason, argued that as he picked up
his samples in the ditches, he ought to sell the medicines presumably
compounded from them for nothing. In one way or other, poor Crabbe had
sunk to the verge of distress. Of course, under these circumstances, he
had fallen in love and engaged himself at the age of eighteen to a young
lady, apparently as poor as himself. Of course, too, he called Miss Elmy
'Mira,' and addressed her in verses which occasionally appeared in the
poet's corner of a certain 'Wheble's Magazine.' My Mira, said the young
surgeon, in a style which must have been rather antiquated even in
Aldborough--

    My Mira, shepherds, is as fair
      As sylvan nymphs who haunt the vale;
    As sylphs who dwell in purest air,
      As fays who skim the dusky dale.

Moreover, he won a prize for a poem on Hope, and composed an
'Allegorical Fable' and a piece called 'The Atheist reclaimed;' and, in
short, added plentifully to the vast rubbish-heap of old-world verses,
now decayed beyond the industry of the most persevering of Dryasdusts.
Nay, he even succeeded by some mysterious means in getting one of his
poems published separately. It was called 'Inebriety,' and was an
unblushing imitation of Pope. Here is a couplet by way of sample:--

    Champagne the courtier drinks the spleen to chase,
    The colonel Burgundy, and Port his Grace.

From the satirical the poet diverges into the mock heroic:--

    See Inebriety! her wand she waves,
    And lo! her pale, and lo! her purple slaves.

The interstices of the box of clothing which went with him from
Aldborough to London were doubtless crammed with much waste paper
scribbled over with these feeble echoes of Pope's Satires, and with
appeals to nymphs, muses, and shepherds. Crabbe was one of those men who
are born a generation after their natural epoch, and was as little
accessible to the change of fashion in poetry as in costume. When,
therefore, he finally resolved to hazard his own fate and Mira's upon
the results of his London adventure, the literary goods at his disposal
were already somewhat musty in character. The year 1780, in which he
reached London, marks the very nadir of English poetry. From the days of
Elizabeth to our own there has never been so absolutely barren a period.
People had become fairly tired of the jingle of Pope's imitators, and
the new era had not dawned. Goldsmith and Gray, both recently dead,
serve to illustrate the condition in which the most exquisite polish and
refinement of language has been developed until there is a danger of
sterility. The 'Elegy' and the 'Deserted Village' are in their way
inimitable poems: but we feel that the intellectual fibre of the poets
has become dangerously delicate. The critical faculty could not be
stimulated further without destroying all spontaneous impulse. The
reaction to a more masculine and passionate school was imminent; and if
the excellent Crabbe could have put into his box a few of Burns's
lyrics, or even a copy of Cowper's 'Task,' one might have augured better
for his prospects. But what chance was there for a man who could still
be contentedly invoking the muse and stringing together mechanic echoes
of Pope's couplets? How could he expect to charm the jaded faculties of
a generation which was already beginning to heave and stir with a
longing for some fresh excitement? For a year the fate which has
overtaken so many rash literary adventurers seemed to be approaching
steadily. One temporary gleam of good fortune cheered him for a time. He
persuaded an enterprising publisher to bring out a poem called 'The
Candidate,' which had some faint success, though ridiculed by the
reviewers. Unluckily the publisher became bankrupt and Crabbe was thrown
upon his resources--the poor three pounds and box of surgical
instruments aforesaid. How he managed to hold out for a year is a
mystery. It was lucky for him, as he intimates, that he had never heard
of the fate of Chatterton, who had poisoned himself just ten years
before. A Journal which he wrote for Mira is published in his Life, and
gives an account of his feelings during three months of his cruel
probation. He applies for a situation as amanuensis offered in an
advertisement, and comforts himself on failing with the reflection that
the advertiser was probably a sharper. He writes piteous letters to
publishers, and gets, of course, the stereotyped reply with which the
most amiable of publishers must damp the ardour of aspiring genius. The
disappointment is not much softened by the publisher's statement that
'he does not mean by this to insinuate any want of merit in the poem,
but rather a want of attention in the public.' Bit by bit his surgical
instruments go to the pawnbroker. When one publisher sends his polite
refusal poor Crabbe has only sixpence-farthing in the world, which, by
the purchase of a pint of porter, is reduced to fourpence-halfpenny. The
exchequer fills again by the disappearance of his wardrobe and his
watch; but ebbs under a new temptation. He buys some odd volumes of
Dryden for three-and-sixpence, and on coming home tears his only coat,
which he manages to patch tolerably with a borrowed needle and thread,
pretending, with a pathetic shift, that they are required to stitch
together manuscripts instead of broadcloth. And so for a year the wolf
creeps nearer the door, whilst Crabbe gallantly keeps up appearances and
spirits, and yet he tries to preserve a show of good spirits in the
Journal to Mira, and continues to labour at his versemaking. Perhaps,
indeed, it may be regarded as a bad symptom that he is reduced to
distracting his mind by making an analysis of a dull sermon. 'There is
nothing particular in it,' he admits, but at least it is better, he
thinks, to listen to a bad sermon than to the blasphemous rant of
deistical societies. Indeed, Crabbe's spirit was totally unlike the
desperate pride of Chatterton. He was of the patient enduring tribe, and
comforts himself by religious meditations, which are, perhaps, rather
commonplace in expression, but when read by the light of the distresses
he was enduring, show a brave unembittered spirit, not to be easily
respected too highly. Starvation seemed to be approaching; or, at least,
the only alternative was the abandonment of his ambition, and
acceptance, if he could get it, of the post of druggist's assistant. He
had but one resource left; and that not of the most promising kind.
Crabbe, amongst his other old-fashioned notions, had a strong belief in
the traditional patron. Johnson might have given him some hints upon the
subject; but luckily, as it turned out, he pursued what Chesterfield's
correspondent would have thought the most hopeless of all courses. He
wrote to Lord North, who was at that moment occupied in contemplating
the final results of the ingenious policy by which America was lost to
England, and probably consigned Crabbe's letter to the waste-paper
basket. Then he tried the effect of a copy of verses, beginning:--

    Ah! Shelburne, blest with all that's good or great,
    T' adorn a rich or save a sinking State.

He added a letter saying that, as Lord North had not answered him, Lord
Shelburne would probably be glad to supply the needs of a starving
apothecary turned poet. Another copy of verses was enclosed, pointing
out that Shelburne's reputed liberality would be repaid in the usual
coin:

    Then shall my grateful strains his ear rejoice,
    His name harmonious thrilled on Mira's voice;
    Round the reviving bays new sweets shall spring,
    And Shelburne's fame through laughing valleys ring!

Nobody can blame North and Shelburne for not acting the part of Good
Samaritans. He, at least, may throw the first stone who has always taken
the trouble to sift the grain from the chaff amidst all the begging
letters which he has received, and who has never lamented that his
benevolence outran his discretion. But there was one man in England at
the time who had the rare union of qualities necessary for Crabbe's
purpose. Burke is a name never to be mentioned without reverence; not
only because Burke was incomparably the greatest of all English
political writers, and a standing refutation of the theory which couples
rhetorical excellence with intellectual emptiness, but also because he
was a man whose glowing hatred of all injustice and sympathy for all
suffering never evaporated in empty words. His fine literary perception
enabled him to detect the genuine excellence which underlay the
superficial triviality of Crabbe's verses. He discovered the genius
where men like North and Shelburne might excusably see nothing but the
mendicant versifier; and a benevolence still rarer than his critical
ability forbade him to satisfy his conscience by the sacrifice of a
five-pound note. When, by the one happy thought of his life, Crabbe
appealed to Burke's sympathy, the poet was desperately endeavouring to
get a poem through the press. But he owed fourteen pounds, and every
application to friends as poor as himself, and to patrons upon whom he
had no claims, had been unsuccessful. Nothing but ruin was before him.
After writing to Burke he spent the night in pacing Westminster Bridge.
The letter on which his fate hung is the more pathetic because it is
free from those questionable poetical flourishes which had failed to
conciliate his former patrons. It tells his story frankly and forcibly.
Burke, however, was not a rich man, and was at one of the most exciting
periods of his political career. His party was at last fighting its way
to power by means of the general resentment against the gross
mismanagement of their antagonists. A perfunctory discharge of the duty
of charity would have been pardonable; but from the moment when Crabbe
addressed Burke the poor man's fortune was made. Burke's glory rests
upon services of much more importance to the world at large than even
the preservation to the country of a man of genuine power. Yet there
are few actions on which he could reflect with more unalloyed
satisfaction; and the case is not a solitary one in Burke's history. A
political triumph may often be only hastened a year or two by the
efforts of even a great leader; but the salvage of a genius which would
otherwise have been hopelessly wrecked in the deep waters of poverty is
so much clear gain to mankind. One circumstance may be added as oddly
characteristic of Crabbe. He always spoke of his benefactor with
becoming gratitude: and many years afterwards Moore and Rogers thought
that they might extract some interesting anecdotes of the great author
from the now celebrated poet. Burke, as we know, was a man whom you
would discover to be remarkable if you stood with him for five minutes
under a haystack in a shower. Crabbe stayed in his house for months
under circumstances most calculated to be impressive. Burke was at the
height of his power and reputation; he was the first man of any
distinction whom the poet had ever seen; the two men had long and
intimate conversations, and Crabbe, it may be added, was a very keen
observer of character. And yet all that Rogers and Moore could extract
from him was a few 'vague generalities.' Moore suggests some
explanation; but the fact seems to be that Crabbe was one of those
simple, homespun characters, whose interests are strictly limited to
their own peculiar sphere. Burke, when he pleased, could talk of oxen as
well as politics, and doubtless adapted his conversation to the taste of
the young poet. Probably, much more was said about the state of Burke's
farm than about the prospects of the Whig party. Crabbe's powers of
vision were as limited as they were keen, and the great qualities to
which Burke owed his reputation could only exhibit themselves in a
sphere to which Crabbe never rose. His attempt to draw a likeness of
Burke under the name of 'Eugenius,' in the 'Borough,' is open to the
objection that it would be nearly as applicable to Wilberforce, Howard,
or Dr. Johnson. It is a mere complimentary daub, in which every
remarkable feature of the original is blurred or altogether omitted.

The inward Crabbe remained to the end of his days what nature and
education had already made him; the outward Crabbe, by the help of
Burke, rapidly put on a more prosperous appearance. His poems were
published and achieved success. He took orders and found patrons.
Thurlow gave him £100, and afterwards presented him to two small
livings, growling out with an oath that he was 'as like Parson Adams as
twelve to a dozen.' The Duke of Rutland appointed him chaplain, a
position in which he seems to have been singularly out of his element.
Further patronage, however, made him independent, and he married his
Mira and lived very happily ever afterwards. Perhaps, with his
old-fashioned ideas, he would not quite have satisfied some clerical
critics of the present day. His views about non-residence and
pluralities seem to have been lax for the time; and his hearty dislike
for dissent was coupled with a general dislike for enthusiasm of all
kinds. He liked to ramble about after flowers and fossils, and to hammer
away at his poems in a study where chaos reigned supreme. For twenty-two
years after his first success as an author, he never managed to get a
poem into a state fit for publication, though periodical conflagrations
of masses of manuscript--too vast to be burnt in the chimney--testified
to his continuous industry. His reappearance seems to have been caused
chiefly by his desire to send a son to the University. His success was
repeated, though a new school had arisen which knew not Pope. The youth
who had been kindly received by Burke, Reynolds, and Johnson, came back
from his country retreat to be lionised at Holland House, and be petted
by Brougham and Moore, and Rogers and Campbell, and all the rising
luminaries. He paid a visit to Scott contemporaneously with George IV.,
and pottered about the queer old wynds and closes of Edinburgh, which he
preferred to the New Town, and apparently to Arthur's Seat, with a
judicious _caddie_ following to keep him out of mischief. A more
tangible kind of homage was the receipt of £3,000 from Murray for his
'Tales of the Hall,' which so delighted him that he insisted on carrying
the bills loose in his pocket till he could show them 'to his son John'
in the country.[2] There, no doubt, he was most at home; and his
parishioners gradually became attached to their 'Parson Adams,' in spite
of his quaintnesses and some manful defiance of their prejudices. All
women and children loved him, and he died at a good old age in 1832,
having lived into a new order in many things, and been as little
affected by the change as most men. The words with which he concludes
the sketch of the Vicar in his 'Borough' are not inappropriate to
himself:--

    Nor one so old has left this world of sin
    More like the being that he entered in.

The peculiar homeliness of Crabbe's character and poetry is excellently
hit off in the 'Rejected Addresses,' and the lines beginning

    John Richard William Alexander Dwyer
    Was footman to Justinian Stubbs, Esquire,

are probably more familiar to the present generation than any of the
originals. 'Pope in the worsted stockings' is the title hit off for him
by Horace Smith, and has about the same degree of truth as most smart
sayings of the kind. The 'worsted stockings' at least are
characteristic. Crabbe's son and biographer indicates some of the
surroundings of his father's early life in a description of the uncle, a
Mr. Tovell, with whom the poet's wife, the Mira of his Journal, passed
her youth. He was a sturdy yeoman, living in an old house with a moat, a
rookery, and fishponds. The hall was paved with black and white marble,
and the staircase was of black oak, slippery as ice, with a chiming
clock and a barrel-organ on the landing-places. The handsome
drawing-room and dining-rooms were only used on grand occasions, such as
the visit of a neighbouring peer. Mrs. Tovell jealously reserved for
herself the duty of scrubbing these state apartments, and sent any
servant to the right-about who dared to lay unhallowed hands upon them.
The family sat habitually in the old-fashioned kitchen, by a huge open
chimney, where the blaze of a whole pollard sometimes eclipsed the
feeble glimmer of the single candle in an iron candlestick, intended to
illuminate Mrs. Tovell's labours with the needle. Masters and servants,
with any travelling tinker or ratcatcher, all dined together, and the
nature of their meals has been described by Crabbe himself:--

    But when the men beside their station took,
    The maidens with them, and with these the cook;
    When one huge wooden bowl before them stood,
    Filled with huge balls of farinaceous food;
    With bacon, mass saline, where never lean
    Beneath the brown and bristly rind was seen;
    When from a single horn the party drew
    Their copious draughts of heavy ale and new;

then, the poet goes on to intimate, squeamish persons might feel a
little uncomfortable. After dinner followed a nap of precisely one hour.
Then bottles appeared on the table, and neighbouring farmers, with faces
rosy with brandy, drifted in for a chat. One of these heroes never went
to bed sober, but scandalised all teetotallers by retaining all his
powers and coursing after he was ninety. Bowl after bowl of punch was
emptied, and the conversation took so convivial a character that Crabbe
generally found it expedient to withdraw, though his son, who records
these performances, was held to be too young to be injured, and the
servants were too familiar for their presence to be a restraint.

It was in this household that the poet found his Mira. Crabbe's own
father was apparently at a lower point of the social scale; and during
his later years took to drinking and to flinging dishes about the room
whenever he was out of temper. Crabbe always drew from the life; most of
his characters might have joined in his father's drinking bouts, or told
stories over Mr. Tovell's punchbowls. Doubtless a social order of the
same kind survived till a later period in various corners of the island.
The Tovells of to-day get their fashions from London, and their
labourers, instead of dining with them in their kitchen, have taken to
forming unions and making speeches about their rights. If, here and
there, in some remote nooks we find an approximation to the coarse,
hearty patriarchal mode of life, we regard it as a naturalist regards a
puny modern reptile, the representative of gigantic lizards of old
geological epochs. A sketch or two of its peculiarities, sufficiently
softened and idealised to suit modern tastes, forms a picturesque
background to a modern picture. Some of Miss Brontë's rough
Yorkshiremen would have drunk punch with Mr. Tovell; and the farmers in
the 'Mill on the Floss' are representatives of the same race, slightly
degenerate, in so far as they are just conscious that a new cause of
disturbance is setting into the quiet rural districts. Dandie Dinmont
again is a relation of Crabbe's heroes, though the fresh air of the
Cheviots and the stirring traditions of the old border life have
conferred upon him a more poetical colouring. To get a realistic picture
of country life as Crabbe saw it, we must go back to Squire Western, or
to some of the roughly-hewn masses of flesh who sat to Hogarth. Perhaps
it may be said that Miss Austen's delicate portrait of the more polished
society, which took the waters at Bath, and occasionally paid a visit to
London, implies a background of coarser manners and more brutal
passions, which lay outside her peculiar province. The question
naturally occurs to social philosophers, whether the improvement in the
external decencies of life and the wider intellectual horizon of modern
days prove a genuine advance over the rude and homely plenty of an
earlier generation. I refer to such problems only to remark that Crabbe
must be consulted by those who wish to look upon the seamy side of the
time which he describes. He very soon dropped his nymphs and shepherds,
and ceased to invoke the idyllic muse. In his long portrait gallery
there are plenty of virtuous people, and some people intended to be
refined; but features indicative of coarse animal passions, brutality,
selfishness, and sensuality are drawn to the life, and the development
of his stories is generally determined by some of the baser elements of
human nature. 'Jesse and Colin' are described in one of the Tales; but
they are not the Jesse and Colin of Dresden china. They are such rustics
as ate fat bacon and drank 'heavy ale and new;' not the imaginary
personages who exchanged amatory civilities in the old-fashioned
pastorals ridiculed by Pope and Gay.

Crabbe's rough style is indicative of his general temper. It is in
places at least the most slovenly and slipshod that was ever adopted by
any true poet. The authors of the 'Rejected Addresses' had simply to
copy, without attempting the impossible task of caricaturing. One of
their familiar couplets, for example, runs thus:--

    Emmanuel Jennings brought his youngest boy
    Up as a corn-cutter, a safe employ!

And here is the original Crabbe:--

    Swallow, a poor attorney, brought his boy
    Up at his desk, and gave him his employ.

When boy cannot be made to rhyme with employ, Crabbe is very fond of
dragging in a hoy. In the 'Parish Register' he introduces a narrative
about a village grocer and his friend in these lines:--

    Aged were both, that Dawkins, Ditchem this,
    Who much of marriage thought and much amiss.

Or to quote one more opening of a story:--

    Counter and Clubb were men in trade, whose pains,
    Credit, and prudence, brought them constant gains;
    Partners and punctual, every friend agreed
    Counter and Clubb were men who must succeed.

But of such gems anyone may gather as many as he pleases by simply
turning over Crabbe's pages. In one sense, they are rather pleasant than
otherwise. They are so characteristic and put forward with such absolute
simplicity that they have the same effect as a good old provincialism in
the mouth of a genuine countryman. It must, however, be admitted that
Crabbe's careful study of Pope had not initiated him in some of his
master's secrets. The worsted stockings were uncommonly thick. If Pope's
brilliance of style savours too much of affectation, Crabbe never
manages to hit off an epigram in the whole of his poetry. The language
seldom soars above the style which would be intelligible to the merest
clodhopper; and we can understand how, when in his later years Crabbe
was introduced to wits and men of the world, he generally held his
peace, or, at most, let fall some bit of dry quiet humour. At rare
intervals he remembers that a poet ought to indulge in a figure of
speech, and laboriously compounds a simile which appears in his poetry
like a bit of gold lace on a farmer's homespun coat. He confessed as
much in answer to a shrewd criticism of Jeffrey's, saying that he
generally thought of such illustrations and inserted them after he had
finished his tale. Here is one of these deliberately-concocted
ornaments, intended to explain the remark that the difference between
the character of two brothers came out when they were living together
quietly:--

    As various colours in a painted ball,
    While it has rest are seen distinctly all;
    Till, whirl'd around by some exterior force,
    They all are blended in the rapid course;
    So in repose and not by passion swayed
    We saw the difference by their habits made;
    But, tried by strong emotions, they became
    Filled with one love, and were in heart the same.

The conceit is ingenious enough in one sense, but painfully ingenious.
It requires some thought to catch the likeness suggested, and then it
turns out to be purely superficial. The resemblance of such a writer to
Pope obviously does not go deep. Crabbe imitates Pope because everybody
imitated him at that day. He adopted Pope's metre because it had come to
be almost the only recognised means of poetical expression. He stuck to
it after his contemporaries had introduced new versification, partly
because he was old-fashioned to the backbone and partly because he had
none of those lofty inspirations which naturally generate new forms of
melody. He seldom trusts himself to be lyrical, and when he does his
versification is nearly as monotonous as it is in his narrative poetry.
We must not expect to soar with Crabbe into any of the loftier regions;
to see the world 'apparelled in celestial light,' or to descry

    Such forms as glitter in the muses' ray,
    With orient hues, unborrowed of the sun.

We shall find no vehement outbursts of passion, breaking loose from the
fetters of sacred convention. Crabbe is perfectly content with the
British Constitution, with the Thirty-nine Articles, and all
respectabilities in Church and State, and therefore he is quite content
also with the good old jogtrot of the recognised metres; his language,
halting invariably, and for the most part clumsy enough, is sufficiently
differentiated from prose by the mould into which it is run, and he
never wants to kick over the traces with his more excitable
contemporaries.

                The good old rule
    Sufficeth him, the simple plan

that each verse should consist of ten syllables, with an occasional
Alexandrine to accommodate a refractory epithet, and should rhyme
peaceably with its neighbour.

From all which it may be too harshly inferred that Crabbe is merely a
writer in rhyming prose, and deserving of no attention from the more
enlightened adherents of a later school. The inference, I say, would be
hasty, for it is impossible to read Crabbe patiently without receiving a
very distinct and original impression. If some pedants of æsthetic
philosophy should declare that we ought not to be impressed because
Crabbe breaks all their rules, we can only reply they are mistaking
their trade. The true business of the critic is to discover from
observation what are the conditions under which a book appeals to our
sympathies, and, if he finds an apparent exception to his rules, to
admit that he has made an oversight, and not to condemn the facts which
persist in contradicting his theories. It may, indeed, be freely granted
that Crabbe has suffered seriously by his slovenly methods and his
insensibility to the more exquisite and ethereal forms of poetical
excellence. But however he may be classified, he possesses the essential
mark of genius, namely, that his pictures, however coarse the
workmanship, stamp themselves on our minds indelibly and
instantaneously. His pathos is here and there clumsy, but it goes
straight to the mark. His characteristic qualities were first distinctly
shown in the 'Village,' which was partly composed under Burke's eye, and
was more or less touched by Johnson. It was, indeed, a work after
Johnson's own heart, intended to be a pendant, or perhaps a corrective,
to Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village.' It is meant to give the bare blank
facts of rural life, stripped of all sentimental gloss. To read the two
is something like hearing a speech from an optimist landlord and then
listening to the comments of Mr. Arch. Goldsmith, indeed, was far too
exquisite an artist to indulge in mere conventionalities about
agricultural bliss. If his 'Auburn' is rather idealised, the most
prosaic of critics cannot object to the glow thrown by the memory of the
poet over the scene of now ruined happiness, and, moreover, Goldsmith's
delicate humour guards him instinctively from laying on his rose-colour
too thickly. Crabbe, however, will have nothing to do with rose-colour,
thick or thin. There is one explicit reference in the poem to his
predecessor's work, and it is significant. Everybody remembers, or ought
to remember, Goldsmith's charming pastor, to whom it can only be
objected that he has not the fear of political economists before his
eyes. This is Crabbe's retort after describing a dying pauper in need of
spiritual consolation:--

    And does not he, the pious man, appear,
    He, 'passing rich with forty pounds a year?'
    Ah! no; a shepherd of a different stock,
    And far unlike him, feeds this little flock:
    A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday's task
    As much as God or man can fairly ask;
    The rest he gives to loves and labours light,
    To fields the morning, and to feasts the night.
    None better skilled the noisy pack to guide,
    To urge their chase, to cheer them, or to chide;
    A sportsman keen, he shoots through half the day,
    And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play.

This fox-hunting parson (of whom Cowper has described a duplicate) lets
the pauper die as he pleases; and afterwards allows him to be buried
without attending, performing the funerals, it seems, in a lump upon
Sundays. Crabbe admits in a note that such negligence was uncommon, but
adds that it is not unknown. The flock is, on the whole, worthy of the
shepherd. The old village sports have died out in favour of smuggling
and wrecking. The poor are not, as rich men fancy, healthy and well fed.
Their work makes them premature victims to ague and rheumatism; their
food is

    Homely, not wholesome, plain, not plenteous, such
    As you who praise would never deign to touch.

The ultimate fate of the worn-out labourer is the poorhouse, described
in lines of which it is enough to say that Scott and Wordsworth learnt
them by heart, and the melancholy deathbed already noticed. Are we
reading a poem or a Blue Book done into rhyme? may possibly be the
question of some readers. The answer should perhaps be that a good many
Blue Books contain an essence which only requires to be properly
extracted and refined to become genuine poetry. If Crabbe's verses
retain rather too much of the earthly elements, he is capable of
transmuting his minerals into genuine gold, as well as of simply
collecting them. Nothing, for example, is more characteristic than the
mode in which the occasional descriptions of nature are harmoniously
blended with the human life in his poetry. Crabbe is an ardent lover of
a certain type of scenery, to which justice has not often been done. We
are told how, after a long absence from Suffolk, he rode sixty miles
from his house to have a dip in the sea. Some of his poems appear to be
positively impregnated with a briny, or rather perhaps a tarry, odour.
The sea which he loved was by no means a Byronic sea. It has no grandeur
of storm, and still less has it the Mediterranean blue. It is the
sluggish muddy element which washes the flat shores of his beloved
Suffolk. He likes even the shelving beach, with fishermen's boats and
decaying nets and remnants of stale fish. He loves the dreary estuary,
where the slow tide sways backwards and forwards, and whence

    High o'er the restless deep, above the reach
    Of gunner's hope, vast flocks of wildfowl stretch.

The coming generation of poets took to the mountains; but Crabbe
remained faithful to the dismal and yet, in his hands, the impressive
scenery of his native salt-marshes. His method of description suits the
country. His verses never become melodramatic, nor does he ever seem to
invest nature with the mystic life of Wordsworth's poetry. He gives the
plain prosaic facts which impress us because they are in such perfect
harmony with the sentiment. Here, for example, is a fragment from the
'Village,' which is simply a description of the neighbourhood of
Aldborough:--

    Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,
    Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor;
    From thence a length of burning sand appears,
    Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears;
    Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,
    Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye;
    There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar,
    And to the ragged infant threaten war;
    There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil;
    There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil;
    Hardy and high, above the slender sheaf,
    The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf;
    O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade,
    And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade.

The writer is too obviously a botanist; but the picture always remains
with us as the only conceivable background for the poverty-stricken
population whom he is about to describe. The actors in the 'Borough' are
presented to us in a similar setting; and it may be well to put a
sea-piece beside this bit of barren common. Crabbe's range of
descriptive power is pretty well confined within the limits so defined.
He is scarcely at home beyond the tide-marks:--

    Be it the summer noon; a sandy space
    The ebbing tide has left upon its place;
    Then just the hot and stony beach above,
    Light twinkling streams in bright confusion move;

           *       *       *       *       *

    There the broad bosom of the ocean keeps
    An equal motion; swelling as it sleeps,
    Then slowly sinking; curling to the strand,
    Faint lazy waves o'ercreep the ridgy sand,
    Or tap the tarry boat with gentle blow,
    And back return in silence, smooth and slow.
    Ships in the calm seem anchored: for they glide
    On the still sea, urged slowly by the tide:
    Art thou not present, this calm scene before
    Where all beside is pebbly length of shore,
    And far as eye can reach, it can discern no more?

I have omitted a couplet which verges on the scientific; for Crabbe is
unpleasantly anxious to leave nothing unexplained. The effect is, in its
way, perfect. Anyone who pleases may compare it with Wordsworth's calm
in the verses upon Peele Castle, where the sentiment is given without
the minute statement of facts, and where, too, we have the inevitable
quotation about the 'light that never was on sea or land,' and is pretty
nearly as rare in Crabbe's poetry. What he sees we can all see, though
not so intensely, and his art consists in selecting the precise elements
that tell most forcibly towards bringing us into the required frame of
mind. To enjoy Crabbe fully, we ought perhaps to be acclimatised on the
coast of the Eastern Counties; we should become sensitive to the
plaintive music of the scenery, which is now generally drowned by the
discordant sounds of modern watering-places, and would seem insipid to a
generation which values excitement in scenery as in fiction. Readers,
who measure the beauty of a district by its average height above the
sea-level, and who cannot appreciate the charm of a 'waste enormous
marsh,' may find Crabbe uncongenial.

The human character is determined, as Mr. Buckle and other philosophers
have assured us, by the climate and the soil. A little ingenuity, such
as those philosophers display in accommodating facts to theory, might
discover a parallel between the type of Crabbe's personages and the
fauna and flora of his native district. Declining a task which might
lead to fanciful conclusions, I may assume that the East Anglian
character is sufficiently familiar, whatever the causes by which it has
been determined. To define Crabbe's poetry we have simply to imagine
ourselves listening to the stories of his parishioners, told by a
clergyman brought up amongst the lower rank of the middle classes,
scarcely elevated above their prejudices, and not willingly leaving
their circle of ideas. We must endow him with that simplicity of
character which gives us frequent cause to smile at its proprietor, but
which does not disqualify him from seeing a great deal further into his
neighbours than they are apt to give him credit for doing. Such insight,
in fact, is due not to any great subtlety of intellect, but to the
possession of deep feeling and sympathy. Crabbe saw little more of Burke
than would have been visible to an ordinary Suffolk farmer. When
transplanted to a ducal mansion, he only drew the pretty obvious
inference, embodied in a vigorous poem, that a patron is a very
disagreeable and at times a very mischievous personage. The joys and
griefs which really interest him are of the very tangible and solid kind
which affect men and women to whom the struggle for existence is a stern
reality. Here and there his good-humoured but rather clumsy ridicule may
strike some lady to whom some demon has whispered 'have a taste;' and
who turns up her nose at the fat bacon on Mr. Tovell's table. He pities
her squeamishness, but thinks it rather unreasonable. He satirises too
the heads of the rustic aristocracy; the brutal squire who bullies his
nephew the clergyman for preaching against his vices, and corrupts the
whole neighbourhood; or the speculative banker who cheats old maids
under pretence of looking after their investments. If the squire does
not generally appear in Crabbe in the familiar dramatic character of a
rural Lovelace, it is chiefly because Crabbe has no great belief in the
general purity of the inferior ranks of rural life. But his most
powerful stories deal with the tragedies--only too life-like--of the
shop and the farm. He describes the temptations which lead the small
tradesman to adulterate his goods, or the parish clerk to embezzle the
money subscribed in the village church, and the evil influence of
dissenting families in fostering a spiritual pride which leads to more
unctuous hypocrisy; for, though he says of the wicked squire that

    His worship ever was a Churchman true,
    And held in scorn the Methodistic crew,

the scorn is only objectionable to him in so far as it is a cynical
cloak for scorn of good morals. He tells how boys run away to sea, or
join strolling players, and have in consequence to beg their bread at
the end of their days. The almshouse or the county gaol is the natural
end of his villains, and he paints to the life the evil courses which
generally lead to such a climax. Nobody describes better the process of
going to the dogs. And most of all, he sympathises with the village
maiden who has listened too easily to the voice of the charmer, in the
shape of a gay sailor or a smart London footman, and has to reap the
bitter consequences of her too easy faith. Most of his stories might be
paralleled by the experience of any country clergyman who has entered
into the life of his parishioners. They are as commonplace and as
pathetic as the things which are happening round us every day, and which
fill a neglected paragraph in a country newspaper. The treatment varies
from the purely humorous to the most deep and genuine pathos; though it
never takes us into the regions of the loftier imagination.

The more humorous of these performances may be briefly dismissed. Crabbe
possesses the faculty, but not in any eminent degree; his hand is a
little heavy, and one must remember that Mr. Tovell and his like were of
the race who require to have a joke driven into their heads with a
sledge-hammer. Once or twice we come upon a sketch which may help to
explain Miss Austen's admiration. There is an old maid devoted to Mira,
and rejoicing in stuffed puppies and parrots, who might have been
ridiculed by Emma Woodhouse, and a parson who would have suited the
Eltons admirably:--

    Fiddling and fishing were his arts; at times
    He altered sermons and he aimed at rhymes;
    And his fair friends, not yet intent on cards,
    Oft he amused with riddles and charades.

Such sketches are a pleasant relief to his more sombre portraiture; but
it is in the tragic elements that his true power comes out. The motives
of his stories may be trivial, but never the sentiment. The deep manly
emotion makes us forget not only the frequent clumsiness of his style
but the pettiness of the incident, and what is more difficult, the
rather bread-and-butter tone of morality. If he is a little too fond of
bringing his villains to the gallows, he is preoccupied less by the
external consequences than by the natural working of evil passions. With
him sin is not punished by being found out, but by disintegrating the
character and blunting the higher sensibilities. He shows--and the
moral, if not new, is that which possesses the really intellectual
interest--how evil-doers are tortured by the cravings of desires that
cannot be satisfied, and the lacerations inflicted by ruined
self-respect. And therefore there is a truth in Crabbe's delineations
which is quite independent of his more or less rigid administration of
poetical justice. His critics used to accuse him of having a low opinion
of human nature. It is quite true that he assigns to selfishness and
brutal passion a very large part in carrying on the machinery of the
world. Some readers may infer that he was unlucky in his experience, and
others that he loved facts too unflinchingly. His stories sometimes
remind one of Balzac's in the descriptions of selfishness triumphant
over virtue. One, for example, of his deeply pathetic poems is called
'The Brothers;' and repeats the old contrast given in Fielding's Tom
Jones and Blifil. The shrewd sly hypocrite has received all manner of
kindnesses from the generous and simple sailor, and when, at last, the
poor sailor is ruined in health and fortune, he comes home expecting to
be supported by the gratitude of the brother, who has by this time made
money and is living at his ease. Nothing can be more pathetic or more in
the spirit of some of Balzac's stories than the way in which the rich
man receives his former benefactor; his faint recognition of fraternal
feelings gradually cools down under the influence of a selfish wife;
till at last the poor old sailor is driven from the parlour to the
kitchen, and from the kitchen to the loft, and finally deprived of his
only comfort, his intercourse with a young nephew not yet broken into
hardness of heart, on the plea that the lad is not to be corrupted by
the coarse language of his poor old uncle. The rich brother suspects
that the sailor has broken this rule, and is reviling him for his
ingratitude, when suddenly he discovers that he is abusing a corpse.
The old sailor's heart is broken at last; and his brother repents too
late. He tries to comfort his remorse by cross-examining the boy, who
was the cause of the last quarrel:--

    'Did he not curse me, child?' 'He never cursed,
    But could not breathe, and said his heart would burst.'
    'And so will mine'----'But, father, you must pray;
    My uncle said it took his pains away.'

Praying, however, cannot bring back the dead; and the fratricide, for
such he feels himself to be, is a melancholy man to the end of his days.
In Balzac's hands repentance would have had no place, and selfishness
have been finally triumphant and unabashed. We need not ask which would
be the most effective or the truest treatment; though I must put in a
word for the superior healthiness of Crabbe's mind. There is nothing
morbid about him. Still it would be absurd to push such a comparison
far. Crabbe's portraits are only spirited vignettes compared with the
elaborate full-lengths drawn by the intense imagination of the French
novelist; and Crabbe's whole range of thought is incomparably narrower.
The two writers have a real resemblance only in so far as in each case a
powerful accumulation of life-like details enables them to produce a
pathos, powerful by its vivid reality.

The singular power of Crabbe is in some sense more conspicuous in the
stories where the incidents are almost audaciously trifling. One of them
begins with this not very impressive and very ungrammatical couplet:--

    With our late Vicar, and his age the same,
    His clerk, hight Jachin, to his office came.

Jachin is a man of oppressive respectability; so oppressive, indeed,
that some of the scamps of the borough try to get him into scrapes by
temptations of a very inartificial kind, which he is strong enough to
resist. At last, however, it occurs to Jachin that he can easily
embezzle part of the usual monthly offerings while saving his character
in his own eyes by some obvious sophistry. He is detected and dismissed,
and dies after coming upon the parish. These materials for a tragic poem
are not very promising; and I do not mean to say that the sorrows of
poor Jachin affect us as deeply as those of Gretchen or Desdemona. The
parish clerk is perhaps a fit type of all that was least poetical in the
old social order of the country, and virtue which succumbs to the
temptation of taking two shillings out of a plate scarcely wants a
Mephistopheles to overcome it. We may perhaps think that the apologetic
note which the excellent Crabbe inserts at the end of his poem, to the
effect that he did not mean by it to represent mankind as 'puppets of an
overpowering destiny,' or 'to deny the doctrine of seducing spirits,' is
a little superfluous. The fact that a parish-clerk has taken to petty
pilfering can scarcely justify those heterodox conclusions. But when we
have smiled at Crabbe's philosophy, we begin to wonder at the force of
his sentiment. A blighted human soul is a pathetic object, however
paltry the temptation to which it has succumbed. Jachin has the dignity
of despair, though he is not quite a fallen archangel; and Crabbe's
favourite scenery harmonises with his agony.

    In each lone place, dejected and dismayed,
    Shrinking from view, his wasting form he laid,
    Or to the restless sea and roaring wind
    Gave the strong yearnings of a ruined mind;
    On the broad beach, the silent summer day,
    Stretched on some wreck, he wore his life away;
    Or where the river mingles with the sea,
    Or on the mud-bank by the elder tree,
    Or by the bounding marsh-dyke, there was he.

Nor would he have been a more pitiable object if he had betrayed a
nation or sold his soul for a Garter instead of the pillage of a
subscription plate. Poor old Jachin's story may seem to be borrowed from
a commonplace tract; but the detected pilferer, though he has only lost
the respect of the parson, the overseer, and the beadle, touches us as
deeply as the Byronic hero who has fallen out with the whole system of
the world.

If we refuse to sympathise with the pang due to so petty a
catastrophe--though our sympathy should surely be proportioned to the
keenness of the suffering rather than the absolute height of the
fall--we may turn to tragedy of a deeper dye. Peter Grimes, as his name
indicates, was a ruffian from his infancy. He once knocked down his poor
old father, who warned him of the consequences of his brutality:--

    On an inn-settle, in his maudlin grief,
    This he revolved, and drank for his relief.

Adopting such a remedy, he sank from bad to worse, and gradually became
a thief, a smuggler, and a social outlaw. In those days, however, as is
proved by the history of Mrs. Brownrigg, parish authorities practised
the 'boarding-out system' after a reckless fashion. Peter was allowed to
take two or three apprentices in succession, whom he bullied, starved,
and maltreated, and who finally died under suspicious circumstances. The
last was found dead in Peter's fishing-boat after a rough voyage: and
though nothing could be proved, the Mayor told him that he should have
no more slaves to belabour. Peter, pursuing his trade in solitude,
gradually became morbid and depressed. The melancholy estuary became
haunted by ghostly visions. He had to groan and sweat with no vent for
his passion:--

    Thus by himself compelled to live each day,
    To wait for certain hours the tide's delay;
    At the same time the same dull views to see,
    The bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree;
    The water only, when the tides were high,
    When low, the mud half-covered and half-dry;
    The sun-burnt tar that blisters on the planks,
    And bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks;
    Heaps of entangled weeds that slowly float,
    As the tide rolls by the impeded boat.

Peter grew more sullen, and the scenery became more weird and
depressing. The few who watched him remarked that there were three
places where Peter seemed to be more than usually moved. For a time he
hurried past them, whistling as he rowed; but gradually he seemed to be
fascinated. The idle loungers in the summer saw a man and boat lingering
in the tideway, apparently watching the gliding waves without casting a
net or looking at the wildfowl. At last his delirium becoming stronger,
he is carried to the poorhouse, and tells his story to the clergyman.
Nobody has painted with greater vigour that kind of externalised
conscience which may still survive in a brutalised mind. Peter Grimes,
of course, sees his victims' spirits and hates them. He fancies that his
father torments him out of spite, characteristically forgetting that the
ghost had some excuse for his anger:--

    'Twas one hot noon, all silent, still, serene,
    No living being had I lately seen;
    I paddled up and down and dipped my net,
    But (such his pleasure) I could nothing get--
    A father's pleasure, when his toil was done,
    To plague and torture thus an only son!
    And so I sat and looked upon the stream,
    How it ran on, and felt as in a dream;
    But dream it was not; no!--I fixed my eyes
    On the mid stream and saw the spirits rise;
    I saw my father on the water stand,
    And hold a thin pale boy in either hand;
    And there they glided ghastly on the top
    Of the salt flood, and never touched a drop;
    I would have struck them, but they knew the intent,
    And smiled upon the oar, and down they went.

Remorse in Peter's mind takes the shape of bitter hatred for his
victims; and with another characteristic confusion, he partly attributes
his sufferings to some evil influence intrinsic in the locality:--

    There were three places, where they ever rose--
    The whole long river has not such as those--
    Places accursed, where, if a man remain,
    He'll see the things which strike him to the brain.

And then the malevolent ghosts forced poor Peter to lean on his oars,
and showed him visions of coming horrors. Grimes dies impenitent, and
fancying that his tormentors are about to seize him. Of all haunted men
in fiction, it is not easy to think of a case where the horror is more
terribly realised. The blood-boulter'd Banquo tortured a noble victim,
but scarcely tortured him more effectually. Peter Grimes was doubtless a
close relation of Peter Bell. Bell having the advantage of Wordsworth's
interpretation, leads us to many thoughts which lie altogether beyond
Crabbe's reach; but, looking simply at the sheer tragic force of the two
characters, Grimes is to Bell what brandy is to small beer. He would
never have shown the white feather like his successor, who,

    After ten months' melancholy,
    Became a good and honest man.

If, in some sense, Peter Grimes is the most effective of Crabbe's
heroes, he would, if taken alone, give a very distorted impression of
the general spirit of the poetry. It is only at intervals that he
introduces us to downright criminals. There is, indeed, a description of
a convicted felon, which, according to Macaulay, has made 'many a rough
and cynical reader cry like a child,' and which, if space were
unlimited, would make a striking pendant to the agony of the burdened
Grimes. But, as a rule, Crabbe can find motives enough for tenderness in
sufferings which have nothing to do with the criminal law, and of which
the mere framework of the story is often interesting enough. His
peculiar power is best displayed in so presenting to us the sorrows of
commonplace characters as to make us feel that a shabby coat and a
narrow education, and the most unromantic of characters, need not cut
off our sympathies with a fellow-creature; and that the dullest
tradesman who treads on our toes in an omnibus may want only a power of
articulate expression to bring before us some of the deepest of all
problems. The parish clerk and the grocer--or whatever may be the
proverbial epitome of human dulness--may swell the chorus of lamentation
over the barrenness and the hardships and the wasted energies and the
harsh discords of life which is always 'steaming up' from the world, and
to which it is one, though perhaps not the highest, of the poet's
functions to make us duly sensible. Crabbe, like all realistic writers,
must be studied at full length, and therefore quotations are necessarily
unjust. It will be sufficient if I refer--pretty much at random--to the
short story of 'Phoebe Dawson' in the 'Parish Register,' to the more
elaborate stories of 'Edward Shore' and the 'Parting Hour' in the
'Tales,' or to the story of 'Ruth' in the 'Tales of the Hall,' where
again the dreary pathos is strangely heightened by Crabbe's favourite
seaport scenery, to prove that he might be called as truly as Goldsmith
_affectuum potens_, though scarcely _lenis, dominator_.

It is time, however, to conclude with a word or two as to Crabbe's
peculiar place in the history of English literature. I said that, unlike
his contemporaries, Cowper and Burns, he adhered rigidly to the form of
the earlier eighteenth-century school, and partly for this reason
excited the wayward admiration of Byron, who always chose to abuse the
bridge which carried him to fame. But Crabbe's clumsiness of expression
makes him a very inadequate successor of Pope or of Goldsmith, and his
claims are really founded on the qualities which led Byron to call him
'nature's sternest painter, yet her best.' On this side he is connected
with some tendencies of the school which supplanted his early models. So
far as Wordsworth and his followers represented the reaction from the
artificial to a love of unsophisticated nature, Crabbe is entirely at
one with them. He did not share that unlucky taste for the namby-pamby
by which Wordsworth annoyed his contemporaries, and spoilt some of his
earlier poems. Its place was filled in Crabbe's mind by an even more
unfortunate disposition for the simply humdrum and commonplace, which,
it must be confessed, makes it almost as hard to read a good many of his
verses as to consume large quantities of suet pudding, and has probably
destroyed his popularity with the present generation. Still, Crabbe's
influence was powerful as against the old conventionality. He did not,
like his predecessors, write upon the topics which interested 'persons
of quality,' and never gives us the impression of having composed his
rhymes in a full-bottomed wig or even in a Grub Street garret. He has
gone out into country fields and village lanes, and paints directly from
man and nature, with almost a cynical disregard of the accepted code of
propriety. But the points on which he parts company with his more
distinguished contemporaries is equally obvious. Mr. Stopford Brooke has
lately been telling us with great eloquence what is the theology which
underlies the poetical tendencies of the last generation of poets. Of
that creed, a sufficiently vague one, it must be admitted, Crabbe was by
no means an apostle. Rather one would say he was as indifferent as a
good old-fashioned clergyman could very well be to the existence of any
new order of ideas in the world. The infidels, whom he sometimes
attacks, read Bolingbroke, and Chubb, and Mandeville, and have only
heard by report even of the existence of Voltaire. The Dissenters, whom
he so heartily detests, have listened to Whitefield and Wesley, or
perhaps to Huntington, S.S.--that is, as it may now be necessary to
explain, Sinner Saved. Every newer development of thought was still far
away from the quiet pews of Aldborough, and the only form of Church
restoration of which he has heard is the objectionable practice of
painting a new wall to represent a growth of lichens. Crabbe appreciates
the charm of the picturesque, but has never yet heard of our elaborate
methods of creating modern antiques. Lapped in such ignorance, and with
a mind little given to speculation, it is only in character that Crabbe
should be totally insensible to the various moods of thought represented
by Wordsworth's pantheistic conceptions of nature, or by Shelley's
dreamy idealism, or Byron's fierce revolutionary impulses. Still less,
if possible, could he sympathise with that love of beauty, pure and
simple, of which Keats was the first prophet. He might, indeed, be
briefly described by saying that he is at the very opposite pole from
Keats. The more bigoted admirers of Keats--for there are bigots in
matters of taste or poetry as well as in science or theology or
politics--would refuse the title of poet to Crabbe altogether on the
strength of the absence of this element from his verses. Like his most
obvious parallels in painting, he is too fond of boors and pothouses to
be allowed the quality of artistic perception. I will not argue the
point, which is, perhaps, rather a question of classification than of
intrinsic merit; but I will venture to suggest a test which will, I
think, give Crabbe a very firm, though, it may be, not a very lofty
place. Though I should be unwilling to be reckoned as one of Macaulay's
'rough and cynical readers,' I admit that I can read the story of the
convicted felon, or of Peter Grimes, without indulging in downright
blubbering. Most readers, I fear, can in these days get through pathetic
poems and novels without absolutely using their pocket-handkerchiefs.
But though Crabbe may not prompt such outward and visible signs of
emotion, I think that he produces a more distinct tendency to tears than
almost any poet of his time. True, he does not appeal to emotions,
accessible only through the finer intellectual perceptions, or to the
thoughts which 'lie too deep for tears.' That prerogative belongs to men
of more intense character, greater philosophical power, and more
delicate instincts. But the power of touching readers by downright
pictures of homespun griefs and sufferings is one which, to my mind,
implies some poetical capacity, and which clearly belongs to Crabbe.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] It seems, one is sorry to add, that Murray made a very bad bargain
in this case.




_WILLIAM HAZLITT_


There are few great books or great men that do not sadden us by a sense
of incompleteness. The writer, we feel, is better than his work. His
full power only reveals itself by flashes. There are blemishes in his
design, due to mere oversight or indolence; his energy has flagged, or
he has alloyed his pure gold to please the mob; or some burst of wayward
passion has disturbed the fair proportions of his work, and the man
himself is a half-finished or half-ruined fragment. The rough usage of
the world leaves its mark on the spiritual constitution of even the
strongest and best amongst us; and perhaps the finest natures suffer
more than others in virtue of their finer sympathies. 'Hamlet' is a
pretty good performance, if we make allowances; but what would it have
been if Shakespeare could have been at his highest level all through,
and if every element of strength in him had been purified from every
weakness? What would it have been, shall we say, if he could have had
the advantage of reading a few modern lectures on æsthetics? We may,
perhaps, be content with Shakespeare as circumstances left him; but in
reading our modern poets, the sentiment of regret is stronger. If Byron
had not been driven into his wild revolt against the world; if Shelley
had been judiciously treated from his youth; if Keats had had healthier
lungs; if Wordsworth had not grown rusty in his solitude; if Scott had
not been tempted into publisher's speculations; if Coleridge had never
taken to opium--what great poems might not have opened the new era of
literature, where now we have but incomplete designs, and listen to
harmonies half destroyed by internal discord? The regret, however, is
less when a man has succeeded in uttering the thought that was in him,
though it may never have found a worthy expression. Wordsworth could
have told us little more, though the 'Excursion' had been as complete a
work as 'Paradise Lost;' and if Scott might have written more
'Waverleys' and 'Antiquaries' and 'Old Mortalities,' he could hardly
have written better ones. But the works of some other writers suggest
possibilities which never even approached fulfilment. If the opinion
formed by his contemporaries of Coleridge be anywhere near the truth, we
lost in him a potential philosopher of a very high order, as we more
clearly lost a poet of singular fascination. Coleridge naturally
suggests the name of De Quincey, whose works are as often tantalising as
satisfying. And to make, it is true, a considerable drop from the
greatest of these names, we often feel when we take up one of Hazlitt's
glowing Essays, that here, too, was a man who might have made a far more
enduring mark as a writer of English prose. At their best, his writings
are admirable; they have the true stamp; the thought is masculine and
the expression masterly; phrases engrave themselves on the memory; and
we catch glimpses of a genuine thinker and no mere manufacturer of
literary commonplace. On a more prolonged study, it is true, we become
conscious of many shortcomings, and the general effect is somehow rather
cloying, though hardly from an excess of sweetness. And yet he deserves
the study both of the critic and the student of character.

The story of Hazlitt's life has been told by his grandson; but there is
a rather curious defect of materials for so recent a biography. He kept,
it seems, no letters,--a weakness, if it be a weakness, for which one is
rather apt to applaud him in these days: but, on the other hand, nobody
ever indulged more persistently in the habit of washing his dirty linen
in public. Not even his idol Rousseau could be more demonstrative of his
feelings and recollections. His Essays are autobiographical, sometimes
even offensively; and after reading them we are even more familiar than
his contemporaries with many points of his character. He loved to pour
himself out in his Essays

                              as plain
    As downright Shippen or as old Montaigne.

He has laid bare for the most careless reader the main elements of his
singular composition. Like some others of his revolutionary friends,
Godwin, for example, Leigh Hunt, and Tom Paine, he represents the old
dissenting spirit in a new incarnation. The grandfather a stern
Calvinist, the father a Unitarian, the son a freethinker; those were the
gradations through which more than one family passed during the closing
years of the last century and the opening of this. One generation still
clung to the old Puritan traditions and Jonathan Edwards; the next
followed Priestley; and the third joined the little band of radicals who
read Cobbett, scorned Southey as a deserter, and refused to be
frightened by the French Revolution. The outside crust of opinion may be
shed with little change to the inner man. Hazlitt was a dissenter to his
backbone. He was born to be in a minority; to be a living protest
against the dominant creed and constitution. He recognised and
denounced, but he never shook off, the faults characteristic of small
sects. A want of wide intellectual culture, and a certain sourness of
temper, cramped his powers and sometimes marred his writing. But from
his dissenting forefathers Hazlitt inherited something better. Beside
the huge tomes of controversial divinity on his father's shelves, the
'Patres Poloni,' Pripscovius, Crellius and Cracovius, Lardner and
Doddridge, and Baxter and Bates, and Howe, were the legends of the
Puritan hagiology. The old dissenters, he tells us, had Neale's 'History
of the Puritans' by heart, and made their children read Calamy's account
of the 2,000 ejected ministers along with the stories of Daniel in the
Lion's Den and Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego. Sympathy for the
persecuted, unbending resistance to the oppressor, was the creed which
had passed into their blood. 'This covenant they kept as the stars keep
their courses; this principle they stuck by, for want of knowing better,
as it sticks by them to the last. It grew with their growth, it does not
wither in their decay.... It glimmers with the last feeble eyesight,
smiles in the faded cheek like infancy, and lights a path before them to
the grave. This'--for in Hazlitt lies a personal application in all his
moralising--'This is better than the whirligig life of a court
poet'--such, for example, as Robert Southey.

But Hazlitt's descent was not pure. If we could trace back the line of
his ancestry we should expect to find that by some freak of fortune, one
of the rigid old Puritans had married a descendant of some great Flemish
or Italian painter. Love of graceful forms and bright colouring and
voluptuous sensations had been transmitted to their descendants, though
hitherto repressed by the stern discipline of British nonconformity. As
the discipline relaxed, the Hazlitts reverted to the ancestral type.
Hazlitt himself, his brother and his sister, were painters by instinct.
The brother became a painter of miniatures by profession; and Hazlitt to
the end of his days revered Titian almost as much as he revered his
great idol Napoleon. An odd pair of idols, one thinks, for a youth
brought up upon Pripscovius and his brethren! A keen delight in all
artistic and natural beauty was an awkward endowment for a youth
intended for the ministry. Keats was scarcely more out of place in a
surgery than Hazlitt would have been in a Unitarian pulpit of those
days, and yet from that pulpit, oddly enough, came the greatest impulse
to Hazlitt. It came from a man who, like Hazlitt himself, though in a
higher degree than Hazlitt, combined the artistic and the philosophic
temperament. Coleridge, as Hazlitt somewhere says, threw a great stone
into the standing pool of contemporary thought; and it was in January
1798--one of the many dates in his personal history to which he recurs
with unceasing fondness--that Hazlitt rose before daylight and walked
ten miles in the mud to hear Coleridge preach. He has told, in his
graphic manner, how the voice of the preacher 'rose like a stream of
rich distilled perfumes;' how he launched into his subject, after giving
out the text, 'like an eagle dallying with the wind;' and how his young
hearer seemed to be listening to the music of the spheres, to see the
union of poetry and philosophy; and behold truth and genius embracing
under the eye of religion. His description of the youthful Coleridge has
a fit pendant in the wonderful description of the full-blown philosopher
in Carlyle's 'Life of Sterling;' where, indeed, one or two touches are
taken from Hazlitt's Essays. It is Hazlitt who remarked, even at this
early meeting, that the dreamy poet philosopher could never decide on
which side of the footpath he should walk; and Hazlitt, who struck out
the epigram that Coleridge was an excellent talker if allowed to start
from no premisses and come to no conclusion. The glamour of Coleridge's
theosophy never seems to have fascinated Hazlitt's stubborn intellect.
At this time, indeed, Coleridge had not yet been inoculated with German
mysticism. In after years, the disciple, according to his custom,
renounced his master and assailed him with half-regretful anger. But the
intercourse and kindly encouragement of so eminent a man seem to have
roused Hazlitt's ambition. His poetical and his speculative intellect
were equally stirred. The youth was already longing to write a
philosophical treatise. The two elements of his nature thus roused to
action led him along a 'strange diagonal.' He would be at once a painter
and a metaphysician. Some eight years of artistic labour convinced him
that he could not be a Titian or a Raphael, and he declined to be a mere
Hazlitt junior. His metaphysical studies, on the contrary, convinced him
that he might be a Hume or a Berkeley; but unluckily they convinced
himself alone. The tiny volume which contained their results was
neglected by everybody but the author, who, to the end of his days,
loved it with the love of a mother for a deformed child. It is written,
to say the truth, in a painful and obscure style; it is the work of a
man who has brooded over his own thoughts in solitude till he cannot
appreciate the need of a clear exposition. The narrowness of his reading
had left him in ignorance of the new aspects under which the eternal
problems were presenting themselves to the new generation; and a
metaphysical discussion in antiquated phraseology is as useless as a
lady's dress in the last year's fashion. Hazlitt, in spite of this
double failure, does not seem to have been much disturbed by
impecuniosity; but the most determined Bohemian has to live. For some
years he strayed about the purlieus of literature, drudging,
translating, and doing other cobbler's work. Two of his performances,
however, were characteristic; he wrote an attack upon Malthus, and he
made an imprudent marriage. Even Malthusians must admit that imprudent
marriages may have some accidental good consequences. When a man has
fairly got his back to the wall, he is forced to fight; and Hazlitt, at
the age of thirty-four, with a wife and a son, at last discovered the
great secret of the literary profession, that a clever man can write
when he has to write or starve. To compose had been labour and grief to
him, so long as he could potter round a thought indefinitely; but with
the printer's devil on one side and the demands of a family on the
other, his ink began to flow freely, and during the last fifteen or
seventeen years of his life he became a voluminous though fragmentary
author. Several volumes of essays, lectures, and criticisms, besides his
more ambitious 'Life of Napoleon,' and a great deal of anonymous
writing, attest his industry. He died in 1830, at the age of fifty-two;
leaving enough to show that he could have done more and a good deal of a
rare, if not of the highest kind of excellence.

Hazlitt, as I have said, is everywhere autobiographical. Besides that
secret, that a man can write if he must, he had discovered the further
secret that the easiest of all topics is his own feelings. It is an
apparent paradox, though the explanation is not far to seek, that
Hazlitt, though shy with his friends, was the most unreserved of
writers. Indeed he takes the public into his confidence with a facility
which we cannot easily forgive. Biographers of late have been guilty of
flagrant violations of the unwritten code which should protect the
privacies of social life from the intrusions of public curiosity. But
the most unscrupulous of biographers would hardly have dared to tear
aside the veil so audaciously as Hazlitt, in one conspicuous instance at
least, chose to do for himself. His idol Rousseau had indeed gone
further; but when Rousseau told the story of his youth, it was at least
seen through a long perspective of years, and his own personality might
seem to be scarcely interested. Hazlitt chose, in the strange book
called the 'New Pygmalion,' or 'Liber Amoris,' to invite the British
public at large to look on at a strange tragi-comedy, of which the last
scene was scarcely finished. Hazlitt had long been unhappy in his family
life. His wife appears to have been a masculine woman, with no talent
for domesticity; completely indifferent to her husband's pursuits, and
inclined to despise him for so fruitless an employment of his energies.
They had already separated, it seems, when Hazlitt fell desperately in
love with Miss Sarah Walker, the daughter of his lodging-house keeper.
The husband and wife agreed to obtain a divorce under the Scotch law,
after which they might follow their own paths, and Sarah Walker become
the second Mrs. Hazlitt. Some months had to be spent by Mr. and Mrs.
Hazlitt in Edinburgh, with a view to this arrangement. The lady's
journal records her impressions; which, it would seem, strongly
resembled those of a tradesman getting rid of a rather flighty and
imprudent partner in business. She is extremely precise as to all
pecuniary and legal details; she calls upon her husband now and then,
takes tea with him, makes an off-hand remark or two about some
picture-gallery which he had been visiting, and tells him that he has
made a fool of himself, with the calmness of a lady dismissing a
troublesome servant, or a schoolmaster parting from an ill-behaved
pupil. And meanwhile, in queer contrast, Hazlitt was pouring out to his
friends letters which seem to be throbbing with unrestrainable passion.
He is raving as Romeo at Mantua might have raved about Juliet. To hear
Miss Walker called his wife will be music to his ears, such as they
never heard. But it seems doubtful whether, after all, his Juliet will
have him. He shrieks mere despair and suicide. Nothing is left in the
world to give him a drop of comfort. The breeze does not cool him nor
the blue sky delight him. He will never lie down at night nor rise up of
a morning in peace, nor even behold his little boy's face with pleasure,
unless he is restored to her favour. And Mrs. Hazlitt reports, after
acknowledging the receipt of £10, that Mr. Hazlitt was so much
'enamoured' of one of these letters that he pulled it out of his pocket
twenty times a day, wanted to read it to his companions, and ranted and
gesticulated till people took him for a madman. The 'Liber Amoris' is
made out of these letters--more or less altered and disguised, with some
reports of conversations with the lovely Sarah. 'It was an explosion of
frenzy,' says De Quincey; his reckless mode of relieving his bosom of
certain perilous stuff, with little care whether it produced scorn or
sympathy. A passion which urges its victim to such improprieties should
be, at least, deep and genuine. One would have liked him better if he
had not taken his frenzy to market. The 'Liber Amoris' tells us
accordingly that the author, Hazlitt's imaginary double, died abroad,
'of disappointment preying on a sickly frame and morbid state of mind.'
The hero, in short, breaks his heart when the lady marries somebody
else. Hazlitt's heart was more elastic. Miss Sarah Walker married, and
Hazlitt next year married a widow lady 'of some property,' made a tour
with her on the Continent, and then--quarrelled with her also. It is not
a pretty story. Hazlitt's biographer informs us, by way of excuse, that
his grandfather was 'physically incapable'--whatever that may mean--'of
fixing his affection upon a single object.' He 'comprehended,' indeed,
'the worth of constancy' and other virtues as well as most men, and
could have written about them better than most men; but somehow 'a
sinister influence or agency,' a periphrasis for a sensuous temperament,
was perpetually present, which confined his virtues to the sphere of
theory. An apology sometimes is worse than a satire. The case, however,
seems to be sufficiently plain. We need not suspect that Hazlitt was
consciously acting a part and nursing his 'frenzy' because he thought
that it would make a startling book. He was an egotist and a man of
impulse. His impressions were for the time overpowering; but they were
transient. His temper was often stronger than his passions. A gust of
anger would make him quarrel with his oldest friends. Every emotion
justified itself for the time, because it was his. He always did well,
whether it pleased him for the moment to be angry, to be in love, to be
cynical, or to be furiously indignant. The end, therefore, of his life
exhibits a series of short impetuous fits of passionate endeavour,
rather than devotion to a single overruling purpose; and all his
writings are brief outbursts of eloquent feeling, where neither the
separate fragments nor the works considered as a whole obey any law of
logical development. And yet, in some ways, Hazlitt boasted, and boasted
plausibly enough, of his constancy. He has the same ideas to the end of
his life that he had at fourteen. He would, he remarks, be an excellent
man on a jury; he would say little, but would starve the eleven other
obstinate fellows out. Amongst politicians he was a faithful Abdiel,
when all others had deserted the cause. He loved the books of his
boyhood, the fields where he had walked, the gardens where he had drunk
tea, and, to a rather provoking extent, the old quotations and old
stories which he had used from his first days of authorship. The
explanation of the apparent paradox gives the clue to Hazlitt's singular
character.

What I have called Hazlitt's egotism is more euphemistically and perhaps
more accurately described by Talfourd,[3] 'an intense consciousness of
his own individual being.' The word egotism in our rough estimates of
character is too easily confounded with selfishness. Hazlitt might have
been the person who, as one making a strange confession, assured a
friend that he took a deep interest in his own concerns. He was, one
would say, decidedly unselfish, if by selfishness is meant a disposition
to feather one's own nest without regard for other people's wants. Still
less was he selfish in the sense of preferring solid bread and butter to
the higher needs of mind and spirit. His sentiments are always generous,
and if scorn is too familiar a mood, it is scorn of the base and
servile. But his peculiarity is that these generous feelings are always
associated with some special case. He sees every abstract principle by
the concrete instance. He hates insolence in the abstract, but his
hatred flames into passion when it is insolence to Hazlitt. He resembles
that good old lady who wrote on the margin of her 'Complete Duty of Man'
the name of that neighbour who most conspicuously sinned against the
precept in the opposite text. Tyranny with Hazlitt is named Pitt, party
spite is Gifford, apostasy is Southey, and fidelity may be called
Cobbett or Godwin; though he finds names for the vices much more easily
than for the virtues. And thus, if he cannot be condemned for
selfishness, one must be charitable not to put down a good many of his
offences to its sister jealousy. The personal and the public sentiments
are so invariably blended in his mind that neither he nor anybody else
could have analysed their composition. He was apt to be the more moody
and irritable because his resentments clothed themselves spontaneously
in the language of some nobler emotion. If his friends are cold, he
bewails the fickleness of humanity; if they are successful, it is not
envy that prompts his irritation, but the rarity of the correspondence
between merit and reward. Such a man is more faithful to his dead than
to his living friends. The dead cannot change; they always come back to
his memory in their old colours; their names recall the old tender
emotion placed above all change and chance. But who can tell that our
dearest living friend may not come into awkward collision with us before
he has left the room? It is as well to be on our guard! It is curious
how the two feelings alternate in Hazlitt's mind in regard to the
friends who are at once dead and living; how fondly he dwells upon the
Coleridge of Wem and Nether Stowey where he first listened to the
enchanter's voice, and with what bitterness, which is yet but soured
affection, he turns upon the Coleridge who defended war-taxes in the
'Friend.' He hacks and hews at Southey through several furious Essays,
and ends with a groan. 'We met him unexpectedly the other day in St.
Giles's,' he says, 'were sorry we had passed him without speaking to an
old friend, turned and looked after him for some time as to a tale of
other days--sighing, as we walked on, Alas, poor Southey!' He fancies
himself to be in the mood of Brutus murdering Cæsar. It is patriotism
struggling with old associations of friendship; if there is any personal
element in the hostility, no one is less conscious of it than the
possessor. To the whole Lake school his attitude is always the
same--justice done grudgingly in spite of anger, or satire tempered by
remorse. No one could say nastier things of that very different egotist,
Wordsworth; nor could anyone, outside the sacred clique, pay him
heartier compliments. Nobody, indeed, can dislike egotism like an
egotist. 'Wordsworth,' says Hazlitt, 'sees nothing but himself and the
universe; he hates all greatness and all pretensions to it but his own.
His egotism is in this respect a madness, for he scorns even the
admiration of himself, thinking it a presumption in anyone to suppose
that he has taste or sense enough to understand him. He hates all
science and all art: he hates chemistry, he hates conchology, he hates
Sir Isaac Newton, he hates logic, he hates metaphysics,' and so on
through a long list of hatreds, ending with the inimitable Napoleon,
whom Wordsworth hates, it seems, 'to get rid of the idea of anything
greater, or thought to be greater, than himself.' Hazlitt might have
made out a tolerable list of his own antipathies; though, to do him
justice, of antipathies balanced by ardent enthusiasm, especially for
the dead or the distant.

Hazlitt, indeed, was incapable of the superlative self-esteem here
attributed to Wordsworth. His egotism is a curious variety of that
Protean passion, compounded as skilfully as the melancholy of Jaques. It
is not the fascinating and humorous egotism of Lamb, who disarms us
beforehand by a smile at his own crotchets. Hazlitt is too serious to be
playful. Nor is it like the amusing egotism of Boswell, combined with a
vanity which evades our contempt, because it asks so frankly for
sympathy. Hazlitt is too proud and too bitter. Neither is it the
misanthropic egotism of Byron, which, through all its affectation,
implies a certain aristocratic contempt of the world and its laws.
Hazlitt has not the sweep and continuity of Byron's passion. His
egotism--be it said without offence--is dashed with something of the
feeling common amongst his dissenting friends. He feels the awkwardness
which prevails amongst a clique branded by a certain social stigma, and
despises himself for his awkwardness. He resents neglect and scorns to
ask for patronage. His egotism is a touchy and wayward feeling which
takes the mask of misanthropy. He is always meditating upon his own
qualities, but not in the spirit of the conceited man who plumes himself
upon his virtues, nor of the ascetic who broods over his vices. He
prefers the apparently self-contradictory attitude (but human nature is
illogical) of meditating with remorse upon his own virtues. What in
others is complacency, becomes with him, ostensibly at least,
self-reproach. He affects--but it is hard to say where the affectation
begins--to be annoyed by the contemplation of his own merits. He is
angry with the world for preferring commonplace to genius, and rewarding
stupidity by success; but in form at least, he mocks at his own folly
for expecting better things. If he is vain at bottom, his vanity shows
itself indirectly by depreciating his neighbours. He is too proud to
dwell upon his own virtues, but he has been convinced by impartial
observation that the world at large is in a conspiracy against merit.
Thus he manages to transform his self-consciousness into the semblance
of proud humility, and extracts a bitter and rather morbid pleasure from
dwelling upon his disappointments and failures. Half-a-dozen of his best
Essays give expression to this mood, which is rather bitter than
querulous. He enlarges cordially on the 'disadvantages of intellectual
superiority.' An author--Hazlitt, to wit--is not allowed to relax into
dulness; if he is brilliant he is not understood, and if he professes an
interest in common things it is assumed that then he must be a fool. And
yet in the midst of these grumblings he is forced to admit a touch of
weakness, and tells us how it pleases him to hear a man ask in the Fives
Court, 'Which is Mr. Hazlitt?' He, the most idiosyncratic of men, and
most proud of it at bottom, declares how 'he hates his style to be
known, as he hates all idiosyncrasy.' At the next moment he purrs with
complacency at the recollection of having been forced into an avowal of
his authorship of an article in the 'Edinburgh Review.' Most generally
he eschews these naïve lapses into vanity. He dilates on the old text of
the 'shyness of scholars.' The learned are out of place in competition
with the world. They are not and ought not to fancy themselves fitted
for the vulgar arena. They can never enjoy their old privileges. 'Fool
that it (learning) was, ever to forego its privileges and loosen the
strong hold it had on opinion in bigotry and superstition!' The same
tone of disgust pronounces itself more cynically in an Essay 'on the
pleasure of hating.' Hatred is, he admits, a poisonous ingredient in all
our passions, but it is that which gives reality to them. Patriotism
means hatred of the French, and virtue is a hatred of other people's
faults to atone for our own vices. All things turn to hatred. 'We hate
old friends, we hate old books, we hate old opinions, and at last we
come to hate ourselves.' Summing up all his disappointments, the broken
friendships, and disappointed ambitions, and vanished illusions, he
asks, in conclusion, whether he has not come to hate and despise
himself? 'Indeed, I do,' he answers, 'and chiefly for not having hated
and despised the world enough.'

This is an outbreak of temporary spleen. Nobody loved his old books and
old opinions better. Hazlitt is speaking in the character of Timon,
which indeed fits him rather too easily. But elsewhere the same strain
of cynicism comes out in more natural and less extravagant form. Take,
for example, the Essay on the 'Conduct of Life.' It is a piece of _bonâ
fide_ advice addressed to his boy at school, and gives in a sufficiently
edifying form the commonplaces which elders are accustomed to address to
their juniors. Honesty, independence, diligence, and temperance are
commended in good set terms, though with an earnestness which, as is
often the case with Hazlitt, imparts some reality to outworn formulæ.
When, however, he comes to the question of marriage, the true man breaks
out. Don't trust, he says, to fine sentiments: they will make no more
impression on these delicate creatures than on a piece of marble. Love
in women is vanity, interest, or fancy. Women care nothing about talents
or virtue--about poets or philosophers or politicians. They judge by the
eye. 'No true woman ever regarded anything but her lover's person and
address.' The author has no chance; for he lives in a dream, he feels
nothing spontaneously, his metaphysical refinements are all thrown away.
'Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek and the
fire in your eye; adorn your person; maintain your health, your beauty,
and your animal spirits; for if you once lapse into poetry and
philosophy you will want an eye to show you, a hand to guide you, a
bosom to love--and will stagger into your grave old before your time,
unloved and unlovely.' 'A spider,' he adds, 'the meanest creature that
crawls or lives, has its mate or fellow, but a scholar has no mate or
fellow.' Mrs. Hazlitt, Miss Sarah Walker, and several other ladies,
thought Hazlitt surly and cared nothing for his treatise on human
nature. Therefore (it is true Hazlittian logic) no woman cares for
sentiment. The sex which despised him must be despicable. Equally
characteristic is his profound belief that his failure in another line
is owing to the malignity of the world at large. In one of his most
characteristic Essays he asks whether genius is conscious of its powers.
He writes what he declares to be a digression about his own experience,
and we may believe as much as we please of his assertion that he does
not quote himself as an example of genius. He has spoken, he declares,
with freedom and power, and will not cease because he is abused for not
being a Government tool. He wrote a charming character of Congreve's
Millamant, but it was unnoticed because he was not a Government tool.
Gifford would not relish his account of Dekkar's Orlando
Friscobaldo--because he was not a Government tool. He wrote admirable
table-talks--for once, as they are nearly finished, he will venture to
praise himself. He could swear (were they not his) that the thoughts in
them were 'founded as the rock, free as the air, the hue like an Italian
picture.' But, had the style been like polished steel, as firm and as
bright, it would have availed him nothing, for he was not a Government
tool. The world hated him, we see, for his merits. It is a bad world, he
says; but don't think that it is my vanity which has taken offence, for
I am remarkable for modesty, and therefore I know that my virtues are
faults of which I ought to be ashamed. Is this pride or vanity, or
humility, or cynicism, or self-reproach for wasted talents, or an
intimate blending of passions for which there is no precise name? Who
can unravel the masks within masks of a cunning egotism?

To one virtue, however, that of political constancy, Hazlitt lays claim
in the most emphatic terms. If he quarrels with all his friends--'most
of the friends I have seen have turned out the bitterest enemies, or
cold, uncomfortable acquaintance'--it is, of course, their fault. A
thoroughgoing egotist must think himself the centre of gravity of the
world, and all change of relations must mean that others have moved away
from him. Politically, too, all who have given up his opinions are
deserters, and generally from the worst of motives. He accuses Burke of
turning against the Revolution from--of all motives in the
world!--jealousy of Rousseau; a theory still more impossible than Mr.
Buckle's hypothesis of madness. Court favour supplies in most cases a
simpler explanation of the general demoralisation. Hazlitt could not
give credit to men like Southey and Coleridge for sincere alarm at the
French Revolution. Such a sentiment would be too unreasonable, for he
had not been alarmed himself. His constancy, indeed, would be admirable
if it did not suggest doubts of his wisdom. A man whose opinions at
fifty are his opinions at fourteen has opinions of very little value. If
his intellect has developed properly, or if he has profited by
experience, he will modify, though he need not retract, his early views.
To claim to have learnt nothing from 1792 to 1830 is almost to write
yourself down as hopelessly impenetrable. The explanation is, that what
Hazlitt called his opinions were really his feelings. He could argue
very ingeniously, as appears from his remarks on Coleridge and Malthus,
but his logic was the slave, not the ruler, of his emotions. His
politics were simply the expression, in a generalised form, of his
intense feeling of personality. They are a projection upon the modern
political world of that heroic spirit of individual self-respect which
animated his Puritan forefathers. One question, and only one question,
he frequently tells us, is of real importance. All the rest is mere
verbiage. The single dogma worth attacking or defending is the divine
right of kings. Are men, in the old phrase, born saddled and bridled,
and other men ready booted and spurred, or are they not? That is the
single shibboleth which distinguishes true men from false. Others, he
says, bowed their heads to the image of the beast. 'I spit upon it, and
buffeted it, and pointed at it, and drew aside the veil that then half
concealed it.' This passionate denial of the absolute right of men over
their fellows is but vicarious pride, if you please to call it so, or a
generous recognition of the dignity of human nature translated into
political terms. Hazlitt's character did not change, however much his
judgment of individuals might change; and therefore the principles which
merely reflected his character remained rooted and unshaken. And yet his
politics changed curiously enough in another sense. The abstract truth,
in Hazlitt's mind, must always have a concrete symbol. He chose to
regard Napoleon as the antithesis to the divine right of kings. That was
the vital formula of Napoleon, his essence, and the true meaning of his
policy. The one question in abstract politics was typified for Hazlitt
by the contrast between Napoleon and the Holy Alliance. To prove that
Napoleon could trample on human rights as roughly as any legitimate
sovereign was for him mere waste of time. Napoleon's tyranny meant a
fair war against the evil principle. Had Hazlitt lived in France, and
come into collision with press laws, it is likely enough that his
sentiments would have changed. But Napoleon was far enough off to serve
as a mere poetical symbol; his memory had got itself entwined in those
youthful associations on which Hazlitt always dwelt so fondly; and,
moreover, to defend 'Boney' was to quarrel with most of his countrymen,
and even of his own party. What more was wanted to make him one of
Hazlitt's superstitions? No more ardent devotee of the Napoleonic legend
ever existed, and Hazlitt's last years were employed in writing a book
which is a political pamphlet as much as a history. He worships the
eldest Napoleon with the fervour of a corporal of the Old Guard, and
denounces the great conspiracy of kings and nobles with the energy of
Cobbett; but he had none of the special knowledge which alone could give
permanent value to such a performance. He seems to have consulted only
the French authorities; and it is refreshing for once to find an
Englishman telling the story of Waterloo entirely from the French side,
and speaking, for example, of left and right as if he had been--as in
imagination he was--by the side of Napoleon instead of Wellington. Even
M. Victor Hugo can see more merit in the English army and its commander.
A radical, who takes Napoleon for his polar star, must change some of
his theories, though he disguises the change from himself; but a change
of a different kind came over Hazlitt as he grew older.

The enthusiasm of the Southeys and Wordsworths for the French Revolution
changed--whatever their motives--into enthusiasm for the established
order. Hazlitt's enthusiasm remained, but became the enthusiasm of
regret instead of hope. As one by one the former zealots dropped off he
despised them as renegades, and clasped his old creed the more firmly to
his bosom. But the change did not draw him nearer to the few who
remained faithful. They perversely loved the wrong side of the right
cause, or loved it for the wrong reason. He liked the Whigs no better
than the Tories; the 'Edinburgh' and the 'Quarterly' were opposition
coaches, making a great dust and spattering each other with mud, but
travelling by the same road to the same end. A Whig, he said, was a
trimmer who dared neither to be a rogue nor an honest man, but was 'a
sort of whiffling, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning
negation of the two.' And the true genuine radical reformers? To them,
as represented by the school of Bentham, Hazlitt entertained an aversion
quite as hearty as his aversion for Whigs and Tories. If, he says, the
Whigs are too finical to join heartily with the popular advocates, the
Reformers are too cold. They hated literature, poetry, and romance;
nothing gives them pleasure that does not give others pain;
utilitarianism means prosaic, hard-hearted, narrow-minded dogmatism.
Indeed, his pet essay on the principles of human nature was simply an
assault on what he took to be their fundamental position. He fancied
that the school of Bentham regarded man as a purely selfish and
calculating animal; and his whole philosophy was an attempt to prove the
natural disinterestedness of man, and to indicate for the imagination
and the emotions their proper place beside the calculating faculty. Few
were those who did not come under one or other clause of this sweeping
denunciation. He assailed Shelley, who was neither Whig, Tory, nor
Utilitarian, so cuttingly as to provoke a dispute with Leigh Hunt, and
had some of his sharp criticisms for his friend Godwin. His general
moral, indeed, is the old congenial one. The reformer is as unfit for
this world as the scholar. He is the only wise man, but, as things go,
wisdom is the worst of follies. The reformer, he says, is necessarily a
marplot; he does not know what he would be at; if he did, he does not
much care for it; and, moreover, he is 'governed habitually by a spirit
of contradiction, and is always wise beyond what is practicable.' Upon
this text Hazlitt dilates with immense spirit, satirising the crotchety
and impracticable race, and contrasting them with the disciplined
phalanx of Toryism, brilliantly and bitterly enough to delight Gifford;
and yet he is writing a preface to a volume of radical Essays. He is
consoling himself for being in a minority of one by proving that two
virtuous men must always disagree. Hazlitt is no genuine democrat. He
hates 'both mobs,' or, in other words, the great mass of the human race.
He would sympathise with Coriolanus more easily than with the Tribunes.
He laughs at the perfectibility of the species, and holds that 'all
things move, not in progress but in a ceaseless round.' The glorious
dream is fled:

    The radiance which was once so bright
    Is now for ever taken from our sight;

and his only consolation is to live over in memory the sanguine times of
his youth, before Napoleon had fallen and the Holy Alliance restored the
divine right of kings; to cherish eternal regret for the hopes that have
departed, and hatred and scorn equally enduring for those who blasted
them. 'Give me back,' he exclaims, 'one single evening at Boxhill, after
a stroll in the deep empurpled woods, before Bonaparte was yet beaten,
with "wine of Attic taste," when wit, beauty, friendship presided at
the board.' The personal blends with the political regret.

Hazlitt, the politician, was soured. He fed his morbid egotism by
indignantly chewing the cud of disappointment, and scornfully rejecting
comfort. He quarrelled with his wife and with most of his friends, even
with the gentle Lamb, till Lamb regained his affections by the brief
quarrel with Southey. Certainly, he might call himself, with some
plausibility, 'the king of good haters.' But, after all, Hazlitt's
cynicism is the souring of a generous nature; and when we turn from the
politician to the critic and the essayist, our admiration for his powers
is less frequently jarred by annoyance at their wayward misuse. His
egotism--for he is still an egotist--here takes a different shape. His
criticism is not of the kind which is now most popular. He lived before
the days of philosophers who talk about the organism and its
environment, and of the connoisseurs who boast of an eclectic taste for
all the delicate essences of art. He never thought of showing that a
great writer was only the product of his time, race, and climate; and he
had not learnt to use such terms of art as 'supreme,' 'gracious,'
'tender,' 'bitter,' and 'subtle,' in which a good deal of criticism now
consists. Lamb, says Hazlitt, tried old authors 'on his palate as
epicures taste olives;' and the delicacy of discrimination which makes
the process enjoyable is perhaps the highest qualification of a good
critic. Hazlitt's point of view was rather different, nor can we ascribe
to him without qualification that exquisite appreciation of purely
literary charm which is so rare and so often affected. Nobody, indeed,
loved some authors more heartily or understood them better; his love is
so hearty that he cannot preserve the true critical attitude. Instead of
trying them on his palate, he swallows them greedily. His judgment of
an author seems to depend upon two circumstances. He is determined in
great measure by his private associations, and in part by his sympathy
for the character of the writer. His interest in this last sense is, one
may say, rather psychological than purely critical. He thinks of an
author not as the exponent of a particular vein of thought or emotion,
nor as an artistic performer on the instrument of language, but as a
human being to be loved or hated, or both, like Napoleon or Gifford or
Southey.

Hazlitt's favourite authors were, for the most part, the friends of his
youth. He had pored over their pages till he knew them by heart; their
phrases were as familiar to his lips as texts of Scripture to preachers
who know but one book; the places where he had read them became sacred
to him, and a glory of his early enthusiasm was still reflected from the
old pages. Rousseau was his beloved above all writers. They had a
natural affinity. What Hazlitt says of Rousseau may be partly applied to
himself. Of Hazlitt it might be said almost as truly as of Rousseau,
that 'he had the most intense consciousness of his own existence. No
object that had once made an impression upon him was ever after
effaced.' In Rousseau's 'Confessions' and 'Nouvelle Héloïse,' Hazlitt
saw the reflections of his own passions. He spent, he declares, two
whole years in reading these two books; and they were the happiest years
of his life. He marks with a white stone the days on which he read
particular passages. It was on April 10, 1798--as he tells us some
twenty years later--that he sat down to a volume of the 'New Héloïse,'
at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken. He
tells us which passage he read and what was the view before his bodily
eyes. His first reading of 'Paul and Virginia' is associated with an inn
at Bridgewater; and at another old-fashioned inn he tells how the rustic
fare and the quaint architecture gave additional piquancy to Congreve's
wit. He remembers, too, the spot at which he first read Mrs. Inchbald's
'Simple Story;' how he walked out to escape from one of the tenderest
parts, in order to return again with double relish.

'An old crazy hand-organ,' he adds, 'was playing "Robin Adair," a summer
shower dropped manna on my head, and slaked my feverish thirst of
happiness.' He looks back to his first familiarity with his favourites
as an old man may think of his honeymoon. The memories of his own
feelings, of his author's poetry, and of the surrounding scenery, are
inextricably fused together. The sight of an old volume, he says,
sometimes shakes twenty years off his life; he sees his old friends
alive again, the place where he read the book, the day when he got it,
the feeling of the air, the fields, the sky. To these old favourites he
remained faithful, except that he seems to have tired of the glitter of
Junius. Burke's politics gave him some severe twinges. He says, in one
place, that he always tests the sense and candour of a Liberal by his
willingness to admit the greatness of Burke. He adds, as a note to the
Essay in which this occurs, that it was written in a 'fit of extravagant
candour,' when he thought that he could be more than just to an enemy
without betraying a cause. He oscillates between these views as his
humour changes. He is absurdly unjust to Burke the politician; but he
does not waver in his just recognition of the marvellous power of the
greatest--I should almost say the only great--political writer in the
language. The first time he read a passage from Burke, he said, This is
true eloquence. Johnson immediately became shelved, and Junius 'shrunk
up into little antithetic points and well-tuned sentences. But Burke's
style was forked and playful like the lightning, crested like the
serpent.' He is never weary of Burke, as he elsewhere says; and, in
fact, he is man enough to recognise genuine power when he meets it. To
another great master he yields with a reluctance which is an involuntary
compliment. The one author whom he admitted into his Pantheon after his
youthful enthusiasm had cooled was unluckily the most consistent of
Tories. Who is there, he asks, that admires the author of 'Waverley'
more than I do? Who is there that despises Sir Walter Scott more? The
Scotch novels, as they were then called, fairly overpowered him. The
imaginative force, the geniality and the wealth of picturesque incident
of the greatest of novelists, disarmed his antipathy. It is curious to
see how he struggles with himself. He blesses and curses in a breath. He
applies to Scott Pope's description of Bacon, 'the greatest, wisest,
meanest of mankind,' and asks--

    Who would not laugh if such a man there be?
    Who would not weep if "Waverley" were he?

He crowns a torrent of abuse by declaring that Scott has encouraged the
lowest panders of a venal press, 'deluging and nauseating the public
mind with the offal and garbage of Billingsgate abuse and vulgar slang;'
and presently he calls Scott--by way, it is true, of lowering
Byron--'one of the greatest teachers of morality that ever lived.' He
invents a theory, to which he returns more than once, to justify the
contrast. Scott, he says, is much such a writer as the Duke of
Wellington (the hated antithesis of Napoleon, whose 'foolish face' he
specially detests) is a general. The one gets 100,000 men together, and
'leaves it to them to fight out the battle, for if he meddled with it
he might spoil sport; the other gets an innumerable quantity of facts
together, and lets them tell their story as they may. The facts are
stubborn in the last instance as the men are in the first, and in
neither case is the broth spoiled by the cook.' Both heroes show modesty
and self-knowledge, but 'little boldness or inventiveness of genius.' On
the strength of this doctrine he even compares Scott disadvantageously
with Godwin and Mrs. Inchbald, who had, it seems, more invention though
fewer facts. Hazlitt was not bound to understand strategy, and devoutly
held that Wellington's armies succeeded because their general only
looked on. But he should have understood his own trade a little better.
Putting aside this grotesque theory, he feels Scott's greatness truly,
and admits it generously. He enjoys the broth, to use his own phrase,
though he is determined to believe that it somehow made itself.

Lamb said that Hazlitt was a greater authority when he praised than when
he abused, a doctrine which may be true of others than Hazlitt. The true
distinction is rather that Hazlitt, though always unsafe as a judge, is
admirable as an advocate in his own cause, and poor when merely speaking
from his brief. Of Mrs. Inchbald I must say what Hazlitt shocked his
audience by saying of Hannah More; that she has written a good deal
which I have not read, and I therefore cannot deny that her novels might
have been written by Venus; but I cannot admit that Wycherley's brutal
'Plain-dealer' is as good as ten volumes of sermons. 'It is curious to
see,' says Hazlitt, rather naïvely, 'how the same subject is treated by
two such different authors as Shakespeare and Wycherley.' Macaulay's
remark about the same coincidence is more to the point. 'Wycherley
borrows Viola,' says that vigorous moralist, 'and Viola forthwith
becomes a pander of the basest sort.' That is literally true. Indeed,
Hazlitt's love for the dramatists of the Restoration is something of a
puzzle, except so far as it is explained by early associations. Even
then it is hard to explain the sympathy which Hazlitt, the lover of
Rousseau and sentiment, feels for Congreve, whose speciality it is that
a touch of sentiment is as rare in his painfully-witty dialogues as a
drop of water in the desert. Perhaps a contempt for the prejudices of
respectable people gave zest to Hazlitt's enjoyment of a literature,
representative of a social atmosphere, most propitious to his best
feelings. And yet, though I cannot take Hazlitt's judgment, I would
frankly admit that Hazlitt's enthusiasm brings out Congreve's real
merits with a force of which a calmer judge would be incapable. His warm
praises of 'The Beggar's Opera,' his assault upon Sidney's 'Arcadia,'
his sarcasms against Tom Moore, are all excellent in their way, whether
we do or do not agree with his final result. Whenever Hazlitt writes
from his own mind, in short, he writes what is well worth reading.
Hazlitt learnt something in his later years from Lamb. He prefers, he
says, those papers of Elia in which there is the least infusion of
antiquated language; and, in fact, Lamb never inoculated him with his
taste for the old English literature. Hazlitt gave a series of lectures
upon the Elizabethan dramatists, and carelessly remarks some time
afterwards that he has only read about a quarter of Beaumont and
Fletcher's plays, and intends to read the rest when he has a chance. It
is plain, indeed, that the lectures, though written at times with great
spirit, are the work of a man who has got them up for the occasion. And
in his more ambitious and successful essays upon Shakespeare the same
want of reading appears in another way. He is more familiar with
Shakespeare's text than many better scholars. His familiarity is proved
by a habit of quotation of which it has been disputed whether it is a
merit or a defect. What phrenologists would call the adhesiveness of
Hazlitt's mind, its extreme retentiveness for any impression which has
once been received, tempts him to a constant repetition of familiar
phrases and illustrations. He has, too, a trick of working in patches of
his old essays, which he expressly defends on the ground that a book
which has not reached a second edition may be considered by its author
as manuscript. This self-plagiarism sometimes worries us, as we are
worried by a man whose conversation runs in ruts. But his quotations
from other authors, where used in moderation, often give a pleasant
richness to his style. Shakespeare, in particular, seems to be a
storehouse into which he can always dip for an appropriate turn of
phrase, and his love of Shakespeare is of a characteristic kind. He has
not counted syllables nor weighed various readings. He does not throw a
new light upon delicate indications of thought and sentiment, nor
philosophise after the manner of Coleridge and the Germans, nor regard
Shakespeare as the representative of his age according to the sweeping
method of M. Taine. Neither does he seem to love Shakespeare himself as
he loves Rousseau or Richardson. He speaks contemptuously of the Sonnets
and Poems, and, though I respect his sincerity, I think that such a
verdict necessarily indicates indifference to the most Shakespearian
parts of Shakespeare. The calm assertion that the qualities of the Poems
are the reverse of the qualities of the plays is unworthy of Hazlitt's
general acuteness. That which really attracts Hazlitt is sufficiently
indicated by the title of his book; he describes the characters of
Shakespeare's plays. It is Iago, and Timon, and Coriolanus, and Anthony,
and Cleopatra, who really interest him. He loves and hates them as if
they were his own contemporaries; he gives the main outlines of their
character with a spirited touch. And yet one somehow feels that Hazlitt
is not at his best in Shakespearian criticism; his eulogies savour of
commonplace, and are wanting in spontaneity. There is not that warm glow
of personal feeling which gives light and warmth to his style whenever
he touches upon his early favourites. Perhaps he is a little daunted by
the greatness of his task, and perhaps there is something in the
Shakespearian width of sympathy and in the Shakespearian humour which
lies beyond Hazlitt's sphere. His criticism of Hamlet is feeble; he does
not do justice to Mercutio or to Jaques; but he sympathises more
heartily with the tremendous passion of Lear and Othello, and finds
something congenial to his taste in Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. It
is characteristic, too, that he evidently understands Shakespeare better
on the stage than in the closet. When he can associate Iago and Shylock
with the visible presence of Kean, he can introduce that personal
element which is so necessary to his best writing.

The best, indeed, of Hazlitt's criticisms--if the word may be so far
extended--are his criticisms of living men. The criticism of
contemporary portraits called the 'Spirit of the Age' is one of the
first of those series which have now become popular, as it is certainly
one of the very best. The descriptions of Bentham, and Godwin, and
Coleridge, and Horne Tooke are masterpieces in their way. They are, of
course, unfair; but that is part of their charm. One would no more take
for granted Hazlitt's valuation of Wordsworth than Timon's judgment of
Alcibiades. Hazlitt sees through coloured glasses, but his vision is not
the less penetrating. The vulgar satirist is such a one as Hazlitt
somewhere mentioned who called Wordsworth a dunce. Hazlitt was quite
incapable of such a solecism. He knew, nobody better, that a telling
caricature must be a good likeness. If he darkens the shades, and here
and there exaggerates an ungainly feature, we still know that the shade
exists and that the feature is not symmetrical. De Quincey reports the
saying of some admiring friend of Hazlitt, who confessed to a shudder
whenever Hazlitt used his habitual gesture of placing his hand within
his waistcoat. The hand might emerge armed with a dagger. Whenever, said
the same friend (Heaven preserve us from our friends!), Hazlitt had been
distracted for a moment from the general conversation, he looked round
with a mingled air of suspicion and defiance, as though some
objectionable phrase might have evaded his censure in the interval. The
traits recur to us when we read Hazlitt's descriptions of the men he had
known. We seem to see the dark sardonic man, watching the faces and
gestures of his friends, ready to take sudden offence at any affront to
his cherished prejudices, and yet hampered by a kind of nervous timidity
which makes him unpleasantly conscious of his own awkwardness. He
remains silent, till somebody unwittingly contradicts his unspoken
thoughts--the most irritating kind of contradiction to some people!--and
perhaps heaps indiscriminating praise on an old friend, a term nearly
synonymous with an old enemy. Then the dagger suddenly flashes out, and
Hazlitt strikes two or three rapid blows, aimed with unerring accuracy
at the weak points of the armour which he knows so well. And then, as he
strikes, a relenting comes over him; he remembers old days with a
sudden gush of fondness, and puts in a touch of scorn for his allies or
himself. Coleridge may deserve a blow, but the applause of Coleridge's
enemies awakes his self-reproach. His invective turns into panegyric,
and he warms for a time into hearty admiration, which proves that his
irritation arises from an excess, not from a defect, of sensibility; but
finding that he has gone a little too far, he lets his praise slide into
equivocal description, and, with some parting epigram, he relapses into
silence. The portraits thus drawn are never wanting in piquancy nor in
fidelity. Brooding over his injuries and his desertions, Hazlitt has
pondered almost with the eagerness of a lover upon the qualities of his
intimates. Suspicion, unjust it may be, has given keenness to his
investigation. He has interpreted in his own fashion every mood and
gesture. He has watched his friends as a courtier watches a royal
favourite. He has stored in his memory, as we fancy, the good retorts
which his shyness or unreadiness smothered at the propitious moment, and
brings them out in the shape of a personal description. When such a man
sits at our tables, silent and apparently self-absorbed, and yet shrewd
and sensitive, we may well be afraid of the dagger, though it may not be
drawn till after our death, and may write memoirs instead of piercing
flesh. And yet Hazlitt is no mean assassin of reputations; nor is his
enmity as a rule more than the seamy side of friendship. Gifford,
indeed, and Croker, 'the talking potato,' are treated as outside the
pale of human rights.

Excellent as Hazlitt can be as a dispenser of praise and blame, he seems
to me to be at his best in a different capacity. The first of his
performances which attracted much attention was the Round Table,
designed by Leigh Hunt (who contributed a few papers), on the old
'Spectator' model. In the essays afterwards collected in the volumes
called 'Table Talk' and the 'Plain Speaker,' he is still better, because
more certain of his position. It would, indeed, be difficult to name any
writer, from the days of Addison to those of Lamb, who has equalled
Hazlitt's best performances of this kind. Addison is too unlike to
justify a comparison; and, to say the truth, though he has rather more
in common with Lamb, the contrast is much more obvious than the
resemblance. Each wants the other's most characteristic vein; Hazlitt
has hardly a touch of humour, and Lamb is incapable of Hazlitt's caustic
scorn for the world and himself. They have indeed in common, besides
certain superficial tastes, a love of pathetic brooding over the past.
But the sentiment exerted is radically different. Lamb forgets himself
when brooding over an old author or summing up the 'old familiar faces.'
His melancholy and his mirth cast delightful cross-lights upon the
topics of which he converses, and we do not know, until we pause to
reflect, that it is not the intrinsic merit of the objects, but Lamb's
own character, which has caused our pleasure. They would be dull, that
is, in other hands; but the feeling is embodied in the object described,
and not made itself the source of our interest. With Hazlitt, it is the
opposite. He is never more present than when he is dwelling upon the
past. Even in criticising a book or a man, his favourite mode is to tell
us how he came to love or to hate him; and in the non-critical Essays he
is always appealing to us, directly or indirectly, for sympathy with his
own personal emotions. He tells us how passionately he is yearning for
the days of his youth; he is trying to escape from his pressing
annoyances; wrapping himself in sacred associations against the fret
and worry of surrounding cares; repaying himself for the scorn of women
or Quarterly Reviewers by retreating into some imaginary hermitage; and
it is the delight of dreaming upon which he dwells more than upon the
beauty of the visions revealed to his inward eye. The force with which
this sentiment is presented gives a curious fascination to some of his
essays. Take, for example, the essay in 'Table Talk,' 'On Living to
One's self,'--an essay written, as he is careful to tell us, on a mild
January day in the country, whilst the fire is blazing on the hearth and
a partridge getting ready for his supper. There he expatiates in happy
isolation on the enjoyments of living as 'a silent spectator of the
mighty scheme of things;' as being in the world, and not of it; watching
the clouds and the stars, poring over a book, or gazing at a picture
without a thought of becoming an author or an artist. He has drifted
into a quiet little backwater, and congratulates himself in all
sincerity on his escape from the turbulent stream outside. He drinks in
the delight of rest at every pore; reduces himself for the time to the
state of a polyp drifting on the warm ocean stream, and becomes a
voluptuous hermit. He calls up the old days when he acted up to his
principles, and found pleasure enough in endless meditation and quiet
observation of nature. He preaches most edifyingly on the
disappointments, the excitements, the rough impacts of hard facts upon
sensitive natures, which haunt the world outside, and declares, in all
sincerity, 'this sort of dreaming existence is the best; he who quits it
to go in search of realities generally barters repose for repeated
disappointments and vain regrets.' He is sincere, and therefore
eloquent; and we need not, unless we please, add the remark that he
enjoys rest because it is a relief from toil; and that he will curse the
country as heartily as any man if doomed to entire rest. This meditation
on the phenomena of his own sensations leads him often into interesting
reflections of a psychological kind. He analyses his own feelings with
constant eagerness, as he analyses the character of his enemies. A good
specimen is the essay 'On Antiquity' in the 'Plain Speaker,' which
begins with some striking remarks on the apparently arbitrary mode in
which some objects and periods seem older to us than others, in defiance
of chronology. The monuments of the Middle Ages seem more antique than
the Greek statues and temples with their immortal youth. 'It is not the
full-grown, articulated, thoroughly accomplished periods of the world
that we regard with the pity or reverence due to age, so much as those
imperfect, unformed, uncertain periods which seem to totter on the verge
of non-existence, to shrink from the grasp of our feeble imagination, as
they crawl out of, or retire into the womb of time, of which our utmost
assurance is to doubt whether they ever were or not.' And then, as
usual, he passes to his own experience, and meditates on the changed
aspect of the world in youth and maturer life. The petty, personal
emotions pass away, whilst the grand and ideal 'remains with us
unimpaired in its lofty abstraction from age to age.' Therefore, though
the inference is not quite clear, he can never forget the first time he
saw Mrs. Siddons act, or the appearance of Burke's 'Letter to a Noble
Lord.' And then, in a passage worthy of Sir Thomas Browne, he describes
the change produced as our minds are stereotyped, as our most striking
thoughts become truisms, and we lose the faculty of admiration. In our
youth 'art woos us; science tempts us with her intricate labyrinths;
each step presents unlooked-for vistas, and closes upon us our backward
path. Our onward road is strange, obscure, and infinite. We are
bewildered in a shadow, lost in a dream. Our perceptions have the
brightness and indistinctness of a trance. Our continuity of
consciousness is broken, crumbles, and falls to pieces. We go on
learning and forgetting every hour. Our feelings are chaotic, confused,
strange to each other and ourselves.' But in time we learn by rote the
lessons which we had to spell out in our youth. 'A very short period
(from 15 to 25 or 30) includes the whole map and table of contents of
human life. From that time we may be said to live our lives over again,
repeat ourselves--the same thoughts return at stated intervals, like the
tunes of a barrel-organ; and the volume of the universe is no more than
a form of words, a book of reference.'

From such musings Hazlitt can turn to describe any fresh impression
which has interested him, in spite of his occasional weariness, with a
freshness and vivacity which proves that his eye had not grown dim, nor
his temperament incapable of enjoyment. He fell in love with Miss Sarah
Wilson at the tolerably ripe age of 43; and his desire to live in the
past is not to be taken more seriously than his contempt for his
literary reputation. It lasts only till some vivid sensation occurs in
the present. In congenial company he could take a lively share in
conversation, as is proved not only by external evidence, but by his
very amusing book of conversations with Northcote--an old cynic out of
whom it does not seem that anybody else could strike many sparks,--or
from the essay, partly historical, it is to be supposed, in which he
records his celebrated discussion with Lamb, on persons whom one would
wish to have seen. But perhaps some of his most characteristic
performances in this line are those in which he anticipates the modern
taste for muscularity. His wayward disposition to depreciate ostensibly
his own department of action, leads him to write upon the 'disadvantages
of intellectual superiority,' and to maintain the thesis that the glory
of the Indian jugglers is more desirable than that of a statesman. And
perhaps the same sentiment, mingled with sheer artistic love of the
physically beautiful, prompts his eloquence upon the game of fives--in
which he praises the great player Cavanagh as warmly, and describes his
last moments as pathetically, as if he were talking of Rousseau--and
still more his immortal essay on the fight between the Gasman and Bill
Neate. Prize-fighting is fortunately fallen into hopeless decay, and we
are pretty well ashamed of the last flicker of enthusiasm created by
Sayers and Heenan. We may therefore enjoy without remorse the prose-poem
in which Hazlitt kindles with genuine enthusiasm to describe the fearful
glories of the great battle. Even to one who hates the most brutalising
of amusements, the spirit of the writer is impressibly contagious. We
condemn, but we applaud; we are half disposed for the moment to talk the
old twaddle about British pluck; and when Hazlitt's companion on his way
home pulls out of his pocket a volume of the 'Nouvelle Héloïse,' admit
for a moment that 'Love of the Fancy is,' as the historian assures us,
'compatible with a cultivation of sentiment.' If Hazlitt had thrown as
much into his description of the Battle of Waterloo, and had taken the
English side, he would have been a popular writer. But even Hazlitt
cannot quite embalm the memories of Cribb, Belcher, and Gully.

It is time, however, to stop. More might be said by a qualified writer
of Hazlitt's merits as a judge of pictures or of the stage. The same
literary qualities mark all his writings. De Quincey, of course,
condemns Hazlitt, as he does Lamb, for a want of 'continuity.' 'No man
can be eloquent,' he says, 'whose thoughts are abrupt, insulated,
capricious, and nonsequacious.' But then De Quincey will hardly allow
that any man is eloquent except Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, and
Thomas De Quincey. Hazlitt certainly does not belong to their school;
nor, on the other hand, has he the plain homespun force of Swift and
Cobbett. And yet readers who do not insist upon measuring all prose by
the same standard, will probably agree that if Hazlitt is not a great
rhetorician, if he aims at no gorgeous effects of complex harmony, he
has yet an eloquence of his own. It is indeed an eloquence which does
not imply quick sympathy with many moods of feeling, or an intellectual
vision at once penetrating and comprehensive. It is the eloquence
characteristic of a proud and sensitive nature, which expresses a very
keen if narrow range of feeling, and implies a powerful grasp of one, if
only one side of the truth. Hazlitt harps a good deal upon one string;
but that string vibrates forcibly. His best passages are generally an
accumulation of short, pithy sentences, shaped in strong feeling, and
coloured by picturesque association; but repeating, rather than
corroborating, each other. The last blow goes home, but each falls on
the same place. He varies the phrase more than the thought; and
sometimes he becomes obscure, because he is so absorbed in his own
feelings that he forgets the very existence of strangers who require
explanation. Read through Hazlitt, and this monotony becomes a little
tiresome; but dip into him at intervals, and you will often be
astonished that so vigorous a writer has not left some more enduring
monument of his remarkable powers.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] In the excellent Essay prefixed to 'Hazlitt's Literary Remains.'




_DISRAELI'S NOVELS_[4]


It is a commonplace with men of literary eminence to extol the man of
deeds above the man of words. Scott was half ashamed of scribbling
novels whilst Wellington was winning battles; and, if Carlyle be a true
prophet, the most brilliant writer is scarcely worthy to unloose the
shoe's latchet of the silent heroes of action. Perhaps it is graceful in
masters of the art to depreciate their own peculiar function. People who
have less personal interest in the matter need not be so modest. I will
confess, at any rate, to preferring the men who have sown some new seed
of thought above the heroes whose names mark epochs in history. I would
rather make the nation's ballads than give its laws, dictate principles
than carry them into execution, and leaven a country with new ideas than
translate them into facts, inevitably mangling and distorting them in
the process. And therefore I would rather have written 'Hamlet' than
defeated the Spanish Armada; or 'Paradise Lost,' than have turned out
the Long Parliament; or 'Gray's Elegy,' than have stormed the heights of
Abram; or the Waverley Novels, than have won Waterloo or even Trafalgar.
I would rather have been Voltaire or Goethe than Frederick or Napoleon;
and I suspect that when the poor historian of the nineteenth century
begins his superhuman work, he will, as a thorough philosopher,
attribute more importance to two or three recent English writers than to
all the English statesmen who have been strutting and fretting their
little hour at Westminster. And therefore, too, I wish that Disraeli
could have stuck to his novels instead of rising to be Prime Minister of
England. This opinion is, of course, entirely independent of any
judgment which may be passed upon Disraeli's political career. Granting
that his cause has always been the right one, granting that he has
rendered it essential services, I should still wish that his brilliant
literary ability had been allowed to ripen undisturbed by all the
worries and distractions of parliamentary existence. Persons who think
the creation of a majority in the House of Commons a worthy reward for
the labours of a lifetime will, of course, differ from this conclusion.
Disraeli, at any rate, ought to have agreed. No satirist has ever struck
off happier portraits of the ordinary British legislator, or been more
alive to the stupefying influences of a parliamentary career. We have
gone through a peaceful revolution since Disraeli first sketched Rigby
and Taper and Tadpole from the life; but the influences which they
embodied are still as powerful, and a parliamentary atmosphere as little
propitious to the pure intellect, as ever. Coningsby, if he still
survives, must have lost many illusions; he must have herded with the
Tapers and Tadpoles, and prompted Rigby to write slashing articles on
his behalf in the quarterlies. He must have felt that his intellect was
cruelly wasted in talking claptrap and platitude to suit the thick
comprehensions of his party; and the huge dead weight of the invincible
impenetrability to ideas of ordinary mankind must have lain heavy upon
his soul. How many Tadpoles, one would like to know, still haunt the
Carlton Club, or throng the ministerial benches, and how many Rigbys
have forced their way into the Cabinet? That is one of the state secrets
which will hardly be divulged by the only competent observer. But at any
rate it is sad that the critic, who applied the lash so skilfully,
should have been so unequally yoked with the objects of his contempt.
Disraeli's talents for entertaining fiction may not indeed have been
altogether wasted in his official career; but he at least may pardon
admirers of his writing, who regret that he should have squandered
powers of imagination, capable of true creative work, upon that
alternation of truckling and blustering which is called governing the
country.

The qualities which are of rather equivocal value in a minister of state
may be admirable in the domain of literature. It is hardly desirable
that the followers of a political leader should be haunted by an
ever-recurring doubt as to whether his philosophical utterances express
deep convictions, or the extemporised combinations of a fertile fancy,
and be uncertain whether he is really putting their clumsy thoughts into
clearer phrases, or foisting showy nonsense upon them for his own
purposes, or simply laughing at them in his sleeve. But, in a purely
literary sense, this ambiguous hovering between two meanings, this
oscillation between the ironical and the serious, is always amusing, and
sometimes delightful. Some simple-minded people are revolted, even in
literature, by the ironical method; and tell the humorist, with an air
of moral disapproval, that they never know whether he is in jest or in
earnest. To such matter-of-fact persons Disraeli's novels must be a
standing offence; for it is his most characteristic peculiarity that
the passage from one phase to the other is imperceptible. He has moments
of obvious seriousness; at frequent intervals comes a flash of downright
sarcasm, as unmistakable in its meaning as the cut of a whip across your
face; and elsewhere we have passages which aim unmistakably, and
sometimes with unmistakable success, at rhetorical excellence. But,
between the two, there is a wide field where we may interpret his
meaning as we please. The philosophical theory may imply a genuine
belief, or may be a mere bit of conventional filling in, or perhaps a
parody of his friends or himself. The gorgeous passages may be
intentionally over-coloured, or may really represent his most sincere
taste. His homage may be genuine or a biting mockery. His extravagances
are kept precisely at such a pitch that it is equally fair to argue that
a satirist must have meant them to be absurd, or to argue only that he
would have seen their absurdity in anybody else. The unfortunate critic
feels himself in a position analogous to that of the suitors in the
'Merchant of Venice.' He may blunder grievously, whatever alternative he
selects. If he pronounces a passage to be pure gold, it may turn out to
be merely the mask of a bitter sneer; or he may declare it to be
ingenious burlesque when put forward in the most serious earnest; or may
ridicule it as overstrained bombast, and find that it was never meant to
be anything else. It is wiser to admit that perhaps the author was not
very clear himself, or possibly enjoyed that ambiguous attitude which
might be interpreted according to the taste of his readers and the
development of events. A man who deals in oracular utterances acquires
instinctively a mode of speech which may shift its colour with every
change of light. The texture of Disraeli's writings is so ingeniously
shot with irony and serious sentiment that each tint may predominate by
turns. It is impossible to suppose that the weaver of so cunning a web
should never have intended the effects which he produces; but
frequently, too, they must be the spontaneous and partly unconscious
results of a peculiar intellectual temperament. Delight in blending the
pathetic with the ludicrous is the characteristic of the true humorist.
Disraeli is not exactly a humorist, but something for which the rough
nomenclature of critics has not yet provided a distinctive name. His
pathos is not sufficiently tender, nor his laughter quite genial enough.
The quality which results is homologous to, though not identical with,
genuine humour: for the smile we must substitute a sneer, and the
element which enters into combination with the satire is something more
distantly allied to poetical unction than to glittering rhetoric. The
Disraelian irony thus compounded is hitherto a unique product of
intellectual chemistry.

Most of Disraeli's novels are intended to set forth what, for want of a
better name, must be called a religious or political creed. To grasp its
precise meaning, or to determine the precise amount of earnestness with
which it is set forth, is of course hopeless. Its essence is to be
mysterious, and half the preacher's delight is in tantalising his
disciples. At moments he cannot quite suppress the amusement with which
he mocks their hopeless bewilderment. When Coningsby is on the point of
entering public life, he reads a speech of one of the initiated,
'denouncing the Venetian constitution, to the amazement of several
thousand persons, apparently not a little terrified by this unknown
danger, now first introduced to their notice.' What more amusing than
suddenly to reveal to good easy citizens that what they took for
wholesome food is deadly poison, and to watch their hopeless incapacity
to understand whether you are really announcing a truth or launching an
epigram!

Disraeli, undoubtedly, has certain fixed beliefs which underlie and
which, indeed, explain the superficial versatility of his teaching.
Amongst the various doctrines with which he plays more or less
seriously, two at least are deeply rooted in his mind. He holds, with a
fervour in every way honourable, a belief in the marvellous endowments
of his race, and connected with this belief is an almost romantic
admiration for every manifestation of intellectual power. Vivian Grey,
in a bit of characteristic bombast, describes himself as 'one who has
worshipped the empire of the intellect;' and his career is simply an
attempt to act out the principle that the world belongs of right to the
cleverest. Of Sidonia, after every superlative in the language has been
lavished upon his marvellous acquirements, we are told that 'the only
human quality that interested him was intellect.' Intellect is equally,
if not quite as exclusively, interesting to the creator of Sidonia. He
admires it in all its forms--in a Jesuit or a leader of the
International, in a charlatan or a statesman, or perhaps even more in
one who combines the two characters; but the most interesting of all
objects to Disraeli, if one may judge from his books, is a precocious
youth, whose delight in the sudden consciousness of great abilities has
not yet been dashed by experience. In some other writers we may learn
the age of the author by the age of his hero. A novelist who adopts the
common practice of painting from himself naturally finds out the merits
of middle age in his later works. But in every one of Disraeli's works,
from 'Vivian Grey' to 'Lothair,' the central figure is a youth, who is
frequently a statesman at school, and astonishes the world before he has
reached his majority. The change in the author's position is, indeed,
equally marked in a different way. The youthful heroes of Disraeli's
early novels are creative; in his later they become chiefly receptive.
Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming show their genius by insubordination;
Coningsby and Tancred learn wisdom by sitting at the feet of Sidonia;
and Lothair reduces himself so completely to a mere 'passive bucket' to
be pumped into by every variety of teacher, that he is unpleasantly like
a fool. Disraeli still loves ingenuous youth; but he has gained quite a
new perception of the value of docility. Here and there, of course,
there is a gentle gibe at juvenile vanity. 'My opinions are already
formed on every subject,' says Lothair; 'that is, on every subject of
importance; and, what is more, they will never change.' But such vanity
has nothing offensive. The audacity with which a lad of twenty solves
all the problems of the universe, excites in Disraeli genuine and really
generous sympathy. Sidonia converts the sentiment into a theory.
Experience, he says, is less than nothing to a creative mind. 'Almost
everything that is great has been done by youth.' The greatest captains,
the greatest poets, artists, statesmen, and religious reformer

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