My Friends and Acquaintance
William Hazlitt VII
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VII.
HAZLITT IN SOCIETY.—HIS MORBID FEELINGS ON POLITICAL TOPICS.—HIS
WORSHIP OF NAPOLEON, AS THE DESTROYER OF THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS.
Though no one could possess a more social turn of mind than
Hazlitt did under ordinary circumstances, I
never met with any other man who so little needed society. If ever there was a mind
“sufficient to itself,” it was that of Hazlitt; and I
believe that, bodily health and the appliances and means of personal comfort being
supposed, he could have passed his life alone on a desert island, with perfect
satisfaction, and even with high and constant intellectual enjoyment; for with him thought
and contemplation were ends in themselves, not merely means to some end disjoined from
them; or, at all events, they were means to the attainment of that Truth which was, in
itself, the great and all-sufficing end of his intellectual being.
What is understood by “society” in its ordinary sense, Hazlitt shunned altogether; ![]()
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and,
above all, that “literary” society in which his admirable powers of
conversation qualified him to shine so conspicuously. He had enough of books and criticism
and philosophy in the way of his profession; it was the business of
his life to “coin his brain for drachmas;” the pleasures of it he wisely sought from other sources, and chiefly from, calling
back the feelings and recollections of the Past; for it is, I think, remarkable that,
though Hazlitt’s views and sentiments respecting mankind were
“as broad and general as the casing air,” he never, or very rarely,
employed his thoughts upon the Future.
The reason, I believe, was, that he could not do so without including politics in his speculations; and this was an almost interdicted
subject with him; it was touching upon a string that “echoed to the seat where hate is throned.” Politics offered the one point which
acted on his temper like monomania. It was capable of changing him from a reasonable being
into a wild beast. It stirred up the bitter and rancorous feelings that, to the very last,
lay festering in his ![]()
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heart, and eating into its core like some
“poisonous mineral”—deposited there by the events that had terminated the
French Revolution; and those feelings were still more firmly rooted by the subsequent
downfal of his idol, Napoleon, and the restoration of
the Bourbons. I have heard those who knew him in his early youth say, that it was the great
events of the French Revolution, and the new era of thought and of things that they seemed
to create throughout Europe, which first called forth Hazlitt’s
intellectual faculties from that dreamy torpor in which they might otherwise have lain for
years longer, perhaps for ever. His early metaphysical work, and many remarkable features
of his after character, show us that those events found his heart filled with all tender
and kindly affections towards his fellow-beings, and all high and happy hopes and
aspirations as to their ultimate destiny. What those events, or rather their immediate
sequents, left that heart, those only can know who had for years
studied it as “a book where men might read strange matters.” In brief,
those events found his bosom the birth-place ![]()
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of universal Love; they
left it “the very heart and throne of tyrannous Hate.”
I shall have more to say on this part of my subject hereafter. At present I
glance at it incidentally, because it is the pivot on which moves the whole character of
Hazlitt’s actual life and destiny. Had his
faculties and sensibilities opened and developed themselves at any other period, or under
any other political aspect, than that of the first French Revolution, he might have been
the very model of a wise and happy man. But as it was, his whole intellectual being—his
temper, affections, passions, meditations, and pursuits—took a sinister turn from those
events, which never afterwards left it, or at least which was never afterwards absent when
its first exciting cause was recalled into action. On all matters but political ones
Hazlitt’s perceptions were almost super-humanly clear and
acute, and his judgment was infallible. But about the political prospects, tendencies, and
events of the day, he was like a child or a woman—either utterly indifferent to them, or,
when not so, regarding them in a light directly opposed to the true one.
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I will give one or two remarkable instances of what I mean. The downfal of
Napoleon, and the restoration of the
Bourbons—which every man of ordinary political sagacity and foresight must have looked upon
as the certain coming on of that natural supremacy of the many
over the few, of which the first French Revolution did but
furnish the rude foretaste and barbarous ante-type—Hazlitt regarded as the final consummation of the triumph of
“Legitimacy” and “Divine Right,” and the utter extinction of human
liberty from the earth. The writings and principles of Bentham and his friends and followers, which have already gone far towards
creating a new era in human society, he looked upon and treated with utter and unmingled
contempt. And as to the aristocracy of England, or of any other country, coming to feel and
admit even the political expediency, much less the natural justice, of Reform and social
regeneration—he would as soon have looked for the Millennium.
The truth is, that many—perhaps it may be said most—of the commanding and
first-rate intellects that have been among us, have ![]()
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not been so much
in actual advance of their age as others of an inferior grade and a different temperament.
It has seemed to be sufficient for them to produce the momentum, of
which others could better feel, direct, and see the results. It was so with Bacon. We have no evidence that he anticipated the vast
consequences to which his principles of philosophising have led, and the still more vast
ones to which they are now leading. Like Hazlitt in
regard to morals, he was no “perfectibility” man, in respect of science and
knowledge: and to anticipate that in the possible existence of which we have no faith, is a
moral contradiction. Though Hazlitt would readily have admitted that
the world has never been in the same moral or intellectual condition for any two centuries
together, and that every nation has, from time to time, differed as much from itself as it
has at all times differed from all others, yet he laughed at those who predicated for the
future anything very different from that which has existed in the past. He sighed and wept
over what he considered as the wreck of human liberty, its hopes, tendencies, and conse-![]()
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quences, as he might be supposed to have done over a mortal bride and
her offspring; seeming to forget that principles are imperishable, that truth and justice
are unchangeable and immortal; and, what is still more to the purpose, that the human mind
has a natural and necessary sympathy with these, and a craving after them, which have the
strength and the permanence of instincts, and therefore cannot be wholly eradicated or
suppressed.
But Hazlitt’s want of hope in
the future condition of his fellow-beings was more a personal than an intellectual failing;
a thing arising more from his own individual circumstances and feelings than from the
convictions or calculations of his understanding. He was a disappointed man; and
despondency was a disease, not a natural quality, of his mind. He had nothing in after-life
to look forward to for himself, and he had nothing to satisfy him in the present. The past
was his only refuge; and even there he found little that was personally gratifying to
him—much that was deeply painful and disappointing, no less to his hopes than to his ![]()
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actual experience. And a man so placed is not likely to see too much
good in prospect for his fellow-creatures; for even the least, desponding among us are but
too apt to “lay the flattering unction to our souls” (for such it is)
that misery is the destined lot of human nature. That we do so is at once the curse and the
crime of that nature; because (like jealousy) it makes the misery on which it feeds. Hope
is more than a blessing—it is a duty and a virtue; and in its absence we not only cannot
accomplish the destiny that awaits us—we do not merit that destiny, and therefore shrink
from admitting its existence, or even its possibility.
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
The founder of Utilitarianism; author of
Principles of Morals and
Legislation (1789).
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).
Emperor Napoleon I (1769-1821)
Military leader, First Consul (1799), and Emperor of the French (1804), after his
abdication he was exiled to Elba (1814); after his defeat at Waterloo he was exiled to St.
Helena (1815).
