My Friends and Acquaintance
William Hazlitt XXII
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XXII.
HIS OPINIONS OF CONTEMPORARIES (continued).—SHELLEY AND MOORE.—HIS
CONNEXION WITH THE “LIBERAL.”
To the powers of Shelley,
and to their poetical results, Hazlitt did as little
justice as to those of Byron. And in this instance I
could never very clearly account to myself for the personal cause of his dislike,—which in
every other similar instance there was no difficulty in doing. Scott was a Tory;—Byron was a lord;—and it will be
seen hereafter, that in the various other cases in which he withheld the due meed of honour
from his distinguished contemporaries, there was some personal feeling or other capable of
explaining, if not of excusing, the injustice. But in the case of
Shelley, I could never make out any better reason than that he had seen him and did not like his looks!
The reason why I cannot tell; I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.”
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This was a favourite mode with Hazlitt of ![]()
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forming his personal opinions; and one which, in his case, was not a very dangerous one, on
account of his intuitive skill in reading “the mind’s observance in the
face.” But there can be no doubt that in this instance he grossly and
strangely deceived himself. If ever any human being was gifted with “the vision
and the faculty divine,” Shelley was so gifted. Yet all
that Hazlitt chose to see in him were certain supposed corollaries
from his personal appearance and physical conformation.
Shelley’s figure was tall and almost unnaturally attenuated,
so as to bend to the earth like a plant that has been deprived of its vital air; his
features had an unnatural sharpness, and an unhealthy paleness, like a flower that has been
kept from the light of day; his eyes had an almost superhuman brightness, and his voice a
preternatural elevation of pitch and a shrillness of tone;—all which peculiarities probably
arose from some accidental circumstances connected with his early nurture and bringing up.*
But all these Hazlitt
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tortured into external types and symbols of that unnatural and
unwholesome craving after injurious excitement, that morbid tendency towards interdicted
topics and questions of moral good and evil, and that forbidden search into the secrets of
our nature and ultimate destiny, into which he strangely and inconsequentially resolved the
whole of Shelley’s productions. His vast and vivid insight into
the possible future, as springing out of and moulded by the present and the past; his
gorgeous and glowing imagination; his universal philanthropy—the patriotism of one whose
all-embracing spirit could know no country but the world; his daring yet devout faith in
good, as the necessary offspring and end of evil; his intense sympathy with all natural
beauty, as the living type, the visible image, of that which is intellectual; his wonderful
affluence and pomp of language,—altogether unrivalled by any other writer, ancient or
modern:—all these Hazlitt seemed to overlook in
Shelley.
There is but one intelligible explanation of this; and it is that, in fact,
Hazlitt had read
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little or nothing of all the various poetical wealth to which I have
referred. And such I believe to have been the case; for though I have often heard him speak
disparagingly of Shelley as a poet, I never heard
him refer to a single line or passage of his published writings.
For Hazlitt’s dislike and disparagement of the author of “Lalla Rookh,” there is not much
difficulty in accounting. He (Moore) was understood
to have discouraged, and ultimately broken off, Lord
Byron’s connexion with Leigh Hunt
and Hazlitt in “The Liberal;” an undertaking which, had it been
cordially taken up by Byron and his friends, might,
Hazlitt thought, have produced great results.
Hazlitt attributed the strangling in its birth of this promising
offspring of the new Spirit of the Age to the personal envy, and consequent ill-offices, of
Moore—and he never forgave him—though much more, I believe, from a
public than a private and personal feeling on the matter.
But what Hazlitt could forgive less
was an insulting reference which Moore has made (in
his “Rhymes on the Road”) to
one of Hazlitt’s intellectual idols, Rousseau, who, ![]()
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with the heroine of the “Confessions,” Madame de Warens, he (Moore) calls
“low people.” Referring to “Les
Charmettes” he says of its former celebrated inhabitants: “And doubtless ’mong the grave and good, And gentle* of their neighbourhood, If known at all, they were but known As strange, low people, low and bad, Madame herself to footmen prone, And her young pauper all but mad.” |
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This outrage upon Hazlitt’s
early associations was more than he could bear. It drove him “all but mad;” and
he never after lost an opportunity, public or private, of venting his indignation against
the perpetrator of it. Nor would it be easy to repel the cannonade of argument and
invective by which he sought to demonstrate that it was an outrage,
no less against fact and justice than against feeling and common honesty.†
I must not refrain from adding my belief, that Hazlitt’s indignation, though not engendered, was in some degree
heightened, by
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his Rousseau-like suspicion that the
poet’s sneer at Rousseau was partly intended to point at himself—a suspicion not wholly without plausible
grounds at the time, considering that he was convinced (whether justly or not I have no
means of knowing) that his (Hazlitt’s) connexion with
“The Liberal” had just been
dissolved by the remonstrances of Moore, on the very grounds urged against Rousseau, namely, that it was “discreditable” to his
“noble” friend to have to do with people who were so “poor” as to
make the connexion desirable to them in a pecuniary point of view; so “low” as
to lodge in a second floor; and so “bad” as to have been seen speaking to
“improper” females by the light of the gas-lamps.
John Fell, bishop of Oxford (1625-1686)
He was Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and Bishop of Oxford (1676) commemorated in Tom
Brown's lines “I do not love thee, Dr Fell, | The reason why I cannot tell.”
William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
English essayist and literary critic; author of
Characters of
Shakespeare's Plays (1817),
Lectures on the English Poets
(1818), and
The Spirit of the Age (1825).
James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)
English poet, journalist, and man of letters; editor of
The
Examiner and
The Liberal; friend of Byron, Keats, and
Shelley.
Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
Irish poet and biographer, author of the
Irish Melodies (1807-34),
The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), and
Lalla
Rookh (1817); he was Byron's close friend and designated biographer.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Swiss-born man of letters; author of, among others,
Julie ou la
Nouvelle Heloïse (1761),
Émile (1762) and
Les Confessions (1782).
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
English poet, with Byron in Switzerland in 1816; author of
Queen
Mab (1813),
The Revolt of Islam (1817),
The Cenci and
Prometheus Unbound (1820), and
Adonais (1821).
