| 270 | WILLIAM HAZLITT. |
As it is of my intimacy alone with Hazlitt that I propose to treat in any detail, I shall pass hastily over that mere desultory acquaintance which ensued on his delivery of the lectures above alluded to. Two or three trifling but characteristic circumstances growing out of that acquaintance are, however, worth referring to.
I well remember, after the successful delivery of his first lecture on the
Comic Writers, my walking home with Hazlitt from the
institution to his house in Westminster. Let those who knew the personal bearing and habits
of William Hazlitt, conceive of a man almost a stranger to him—who had
only exchanged words with him in a sort of official capacity—let the
intimates of Hazlitt conceive of such a person volunteering to walk
home with him, for the purpose of having
| WILLIAM HAZLITT. | 271 |
The “general reader” will wonder what there was extraordinary in
this, but the initiated will not believe it. They can fancy him sitting sulkily in the
stocks, or walking doggedly round in the pillory; for a superior physical force might have
placed him there, and being there, he was too much of a logician to quarrel with necessity.
But to walk straight home at ten o’clock at night, “in a respectable and
gentlemanlike manner!” It cannot have been! Arm-in-arm, too, and with a very young
gentleman in a point device costume! I think I hear Charles
Lamb exclaim, “Why the angel Gabriel could not have persuaded
Hazlitt to walk arm-in-arm with him for half
the length of Southampton Buildings.” Perhaps not—but with a writer in Blackwood’s Magazine it was different;—one, too, who had tacitly
engaged to give a favourable account of him in that terror and bugbear of his
| 272 | WILLIAM HAZLITT. |
Let me here, once for all, get over this only painful and repugnant portion of the task I have undertaken; for that once off my conscience, I shall go forward much more to my own satisfaction, and therefore to the reader’s. In resolving to tell what I know, or have been led to feel, of William Hazlitt, I have determined to “nothing extenuate.” I at once, then, confess that the plague-spot of his personal character was an ingrained selfishness, which more or less influenced and modified all the other points of his nature.
This is a hard stone to fling at a man of whom one is proud to be deemed the
friend in spite of it. But now that it cannot hurt him, the truth may be told: nay, I
verily
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Let me still further guard against being mistaken by Hazlitt’s friends and misinterpreted by his enemies.
The defect which I have noticed in his character was little in amount. I never knew him do
a base or mean action; and I have known him do many that might fairly claim to be deemed
magnanimous, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. It would be the basest of libels upon
Hazlitt to describe him as a mean-souled man. But the tendency,
the taint was there; though it seldom showed itself in overt acts, and never without a sort
of half-struggle to overcome it; or in default of that, a half-ostentatious exposure of the
weakness, as one of which he was not merely conscious, but took to himself more shame
| 274 | WILLIAM HAZLITT. |
I shall leave it to those enemies to collect proofs and illustrations of
this “original sin” of Hazlitt’s
temperament. I have done my self-prescribed duty in declaring the existence of the evil,
and shall now quit the painful and ungrateful theme, after having ventured on one more
remark in connexion with it. I have said that the above-named trait in
Hazlitt’s character was, like Othello’s declension into the vale of years, “not much.”
I will add, that like that, it was (practically) fatal to his peace of mind; for he could
not choose but be deeply conscious of it, and this gave him an ever-present sense of his
own comparative unworthiness, and made him listen more eagerly to the suggestions of that
self-raised demon, who, Iago-like, was ever at his
elbow, urging him on to insane jealousies and suspicions of the good faith of those on whom
his heart and spirit yearned to rest and repose. Hazlitt had strong
and burning affections, which could never find a fit object whereon to lean for support; so
that, like the projections of a disease-worn frame, at
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To return to our “progress” from Blackfriars to Westminster, after Hazlitt’s first lecture on the Comic Writers. I remember he declined my offered arm at first—which I interpreted as an evidence of his excessive modesty! I pressed it, however, and he then took it—but as if it had been a bar of hot iron—holding it gingerly, with the tips of his fingers, much after the fashion in which he used to shake hands with those friends who were inadvertent or absent enough to proffer that ceremony.
| 276 | WILLIAM HAZLITT. |
Nevertheless, we talked bravely by the way (though every third sentence on
his part was concluded by a “Sir”) till we got to that broad part of
Parliament-street opposite to the Admiralty and the Horse Guards. Here, however, we met
with a rather unseemly interruption, in the form of sundry petitioners; and I shall never
forget the air of infantine simplicity with which Hazlitt received and answered them. That I should see anything
exceptionable in the acquaintance seemed not to enter his thoughts; but his surprise and
horror were extreme at the breach of etiquette committed by his
unhappy protegées, in thus addressing him in the presence of a third
person! And this feeling was evidently not on his own account, but on mine. His forbearance
and charity for the “unfortunate” persons in question were without limits; and
he did not care if all the world knew it, and witnessed the results that ensued whenever
his pocket was on a par with his humanity in this particular. But it by no means followed
that others might have reached the same philosophic pitch of benevolence: and, with the
fewest “prejudices” of any man I
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I shall make no apology for relating this incident; for those who feel a
sufficient interest in the character of the late William
Hazlitt to have accompanied me thus far in my Recollections of him, are not
likely to be
| 278 | WILLIAM HAZLITT. |
I shall conclude the record of my first acquaintance with Hazlitt by referring to another incident, still more characteristic than the above, of the mind and character I would help to delineate. I had, as the reader has seen, been the occasion of securing to Hazlitt what he considered and called “the best job” he ever had as a professed author; for, besides the sum he was to receive for the delivery of the course of lectures, he had sold the copyright of them for a handsome price. I had, moreover, not merely kept his lectures from being abused in “Blackwood’s,” but had praised them there to the full amount of his expectations.* And, to crown the climax of (so-called) obligation, I had, if I remember
* In order to show that Hazlitt was not unreasonable or exigent in his requirements in cases of this nature, I subjoin the note he wrote me on the occasion of my sending him in MS. the article in question:— “Dear Sir,—I am very well satisfied with the article, and obliged to you for it. I am afraid the censure is truer than the praise. It will be of great service if they insert it entire, which, however, I hope. “Your obliged, “W. Hazlitt.”
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Let the reader judge of my mingled horror and astonishment at finding, in the next number of the “London Magazine,” a ferocious personal attack on myself, almost by name, in which my innocent and unconscious adoption of a worthless phrase or word of his was characterised as an atrocious appropriation of his property, and the doer of it written down, in so many words, a “petty-larceny rascal,” and threatened with redoubled vengeance in future if he did not leave off his pickpocket proceedings!
Being totally unconscious of any other cause
| 280 | WILLIAM HAZLITT. |
It is astonishing how quickly a personal proof of this kind brings conviction to one’s mind on a doubtful point, when nothing else can. I had heard repeated instances of Hazlitt committing unprovoked outrages of this description on his best friends; but knowing and feeling them to be against nature, I would not allow myself to believe them. But the moment he committed one of a similar kind against myself, I not merely believed it, but believed all the rest in virtue of it; though it was even more inexplicable, on any received principle of human action, than all the rest, and more against all my previous experience.
I hope the reader anticipates the true ex-
| WILLIAM HAZLITT. | 281 |
I do not know how it may have been with Hazlitt’s friends in cases similar to that which I have just referred
to, or how it might have been with myself had I at that time ranked among them; though I
believe that, even in that case, my angry feelings (if I had experienced any) would have
arisen solely from his supposing me capable of the unspeakable meanness in question. But
merely as an acquaintance, and that acquaintance sought by myself, and almost forced upon
| 282 | WILLIAM HAZLITT. |
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