My Friends and Acquaintance
William Hazlitt XVII
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XVII.
MORE EVENINGS AT THE SOUTHAMPTON.—BARRY
CORNWALL.—MR. M——Y, A PHILOSOPHIC LAWYER.—MR.
W—E, AN AMATEUR CRITIC.—HAZLITT’S CRITICAL
ESTIMATE OF HIS FRIENDS.
I might here offer the reader some pleasant reminiscences
connected with those evenings at the Southampton to which I have incidentally referred
above. But the theme is so tempting, that, if I were to enter upon it formally, it would
lead me too far from what I desire to keep before me as the chief object of attention.
Besides which, Hazlitt himself has treated of those
evenings in so delightful a manner (in his paper on “Coffee-house Politicians,” in vol. ii. of the
“Table Talk”), that I may
not venture to touch them after him. But there are three or four individuals who used to
form part of those pleasant symposii, to whom the
nature of these Recollections calls upon me to refer more particularly than in a passing
paragraph. The most distinguished of these was the amiable ![]()
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and gifted
poet, so universally known to the reading world under the name of Barry Cornwall. This gentleman used but seldom to grace
our simple feasts (“of reason,” or of folly, as the case might be); but when he
did look in by accident, or was induced by Hazlitt’s request to
come, everything went off the better for his presence; for, besides the fact of
Hazlitt’s being fond of his society, and, at the same time,
thinking so highly of his talents as always to talk his best when he
(P——r) was a partaker in the talk, there is an endearing something
in the personal manner of that exquisite writer, an appearance of gentle and genial
sympathy with the feelings of those with whom he talks, which has the effect of exciting
towards him that personal interest from which it seems itself to
spring, and in the absence of which the better feelings and mental characteristics incident
to social converse are seldom if ever called forth. In
P——r Hazlitt always found a man of fine
and delicate intellectual pretensions, who was nevertheless eager and pleased to listen,
with attention and interest, to all the little insignificant details of his daily life ![]()
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which so often made up the favourite theme of his conversation, and
which must have seemed, to ordinary hearers, the most utter and empty common-place; but
from which Hazlitt (when encouraged by the interest I have spoken of,
or not stilled into silence by its absence) used to extract materials for constructing the
most subtle and profound theories of the human character, or themes for conveying the most
deep-thoughted wisdom, or the most pure and touching morality. And, above all other themes,
to P——r, and to him alone (except myself) Hazlitt
could venture to relate, in all their endless details, those “affairs of the
heart” in one of which his head was always engaged, and which
happily always (with one fatal exception) evaporated in that interminable talk about them
of which he was so strangely fond.
Not that Hazlitt confined his
confidences on this head to P——r and myself. On the
contrary, he extended them to almost every individual with whom he had occasion to speak,
if he could, by hook or by crook, find or make the occasion of bringing in the topic. But,
in general, he did this from a sort of ![]()
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physical incapacity to avoid
the favourite yet dreaded theme of his thoughts; and he did it with a perfect knowledge
that his confidential communications were a bore to nine-tenths of those who listened to
them, and consequently that the pleasure of the communication was anything but mutual. In
fact, it must be confessed that the details of Hazlitt’s dreamy
amourettes had as little interest for
anybody but the dreamer, as those of any other dreams have. But still they were his dreams, related and expounded by his own subtle and profound
intellect; and, for my own part, I must say that I never listened to his accounts of them
without learning something new and worth knowing of the human mind or heart, and often not
without gaining glimpses and guesses into the most secret and sacred of their recesses,
that I might have sought in vain elsewhere, or under any other circumstances whatever. I am
therefore the less disposed to doubt, that the interest which P——r
seemed to take in the same study was not an assumed one, merely put on to please the humour
of one who, in the particular now in ![]()
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question, was looked upon and
often treated as a child, even by some of his most admiring friends. The truth is, that
Hazlitt was a child in this master; yet
at the same time he was a metaphysician, a philosopher, and a poet: and hence the (in my
mind) curious and unique interest which attached to his mingled details and dissertations
on this the most favourite of all his themes of converse, at least in a tête-à-tête; for he rarely, if ever, brought up the
subject under any other circumstances.
Another of Hazlitt’s favourite
companions at the Southampton was a Mr. M——y, of
whom he has made such pleasant mention in the essay noticed above, on “Coffee-house Politicians;” among
which latter class, however, M——y was by no means included.
M——y was (and is, I hope) a solicitor, of good practice, residing
in a neighbouring Inn of Court, who never failed, when in town, to escape at night from the
grave vacuity and bustling nonentity of the law, to enjoy, in his own quiet little box at
the Southampton, over his interminable goes of gin-and-water, the
occasional converse that ![]()
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the chances of the evening might offer; and
it was there that Hazlitt became acquainted with him, and their
acquaintance never extended beyond the scene of its origination. Yet
Hazlitt had a great respect and even personal regard for
M——y, and always seemed to take pleasure in addressing and
listening to him, which, however, he did invariably from the opposite side of the room,
and, in nine cases out of ten, without the possibility of making out one-half of what
M. said, partly from the very low tone of voice in which he was
accustomed to speak (as if addressing himself or his glass of gin-and-water), but chiefly
on account of the hour of Hazlitt’s arrival being usually late
enough to have allowed the aforesaid goes to effect their
desiderated end, of so blending together into a pleasing confusion the confines of
dream-land and reality, that the happy borderer used to murmur inwardly precisely like a
man who talks in his sleep.
For my own part, often as I have talked and listened to M——y with unmingled pleasure, I have no recollection of
having clearly understood a single sentence that he ![]()
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ever uttered. Yet
when you did catch a glimpse of opinion or a glance of meaning, it was invariably of a
nature to impress you with that personal respect for the speaker which is one of the rarest
of all the results of desultory conversation—most of all, of coffee-house conversation. In
fact, M——y was a singular example of that rara avis in the Inns of Court, a man of the purest simplicity and
the strictest honesty of mind, directed by sterling good sense, and modified by those high
sentiments of personal honour, and that humane and liberal consideration for the feelings
of others, which constitute the better part of the true “gentleman.”
Another of the circumstances which made the society of this person so
agreeable to Hazlitt, was the fact of his having
been formerly acquainted with the friends and associates of
Hazlitt’s early life—Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge,—his (M.’s) family having lived, and being then still living, I believe, in
the neighbourhood of the Cumberland lakes. The opportunity thus afforded
Hazlitt of comparing notes, as it were, on the personal characters
of those distinguished men, with one who had no ![]()
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literary prejudices either for or against them (for
M——y made no pretensions to a literary taste), was what he had
never met with elsewhere; and he used it often and freely.
Another of the Southampton companions of Hazlitt, during my acquaintance with him, was a Mr. W——e, of the India House, a friend also of Charles Lamb’s, and therefore associated by
Hazlitt with some of his most pleasant recollections of that
coterie the breaking up of which he so often regretted. W——e was (and
I hope still is) a man of much shrewdness of observation, and considerable delicacy of
taste, in matters both of literature and art; but so fastidious in his demands for every
sort of perfection, that Hazlitt looked upon an evening spent with him
as a kind of discipline of his critical faculties and judgment. For
W——e had no more respect for an opinion or a dictum merely because
it was Hazlitt’s, than if it had been anybody else’s. If
it struck him as just and true, he at once admitted and appreciated it; but if not, he
contested it as freely and pertinaciously, coming from the first critical authority of ![]()
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his day, (as he believed and acknowledged
Hazlitt’s to be—perchance with a modest mental reservation
in favour of one other person!) as if it came from a mere novice or
a nobody. And this habit of social intercourse, instead of piqueing
Hazlitt, pleased and often excited him to an earnestness of
discussion and illustration that we might else have been without. Accordingly, I have never
heard Hazlitt talk better—by which I mean at once more amusingly and
more instructively—than when W——e formed one of the talkers and
listeners. W——e, too, had a taste (of his own,
like all his other tastes and opinions) for pictures—which often furnished occasion for the
display of Hazlitt’s exquisite judgment in respect to the higher
branches of art, and his profound insight into the principles on which their power of
affecting us rests. W——e’s fastidiousness, too (for he was the
“Man of Refinement” of our little knot of talkers), was not seldom a pleasant
topic of examination in his absence; though it was never treated of in terms that he
himself might not have been present to hear.
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This latter fact reminds me to remark on what was deemed by many of
Hazlitt’s friends a crying defect in his
intellectual character; I mean his disposition to discuss, in their absence, the qualities
and characteristics of his friends and acquaintance, with a freedom, and even severity, of
criticism, which were in no degree modified by the fact of the parties treated of being
numbered among his intimate associates. This complaint against Hazlitt
was, I am afraid, founded on something worse than a mistake. It was the result of a self-deception, at the best; in some cases it originated in a desire
meanly to deceive others. Those who call speaking the truth of our friends behind their
backs an act of treachery, and consider the treating of their vices, errors, and weaknesses
as if they were facts or abstract propositions, as a traducing of
them, will not be likely to see anything worse in inventing or propagating falsehoods of
them for our sport or profit. Hazlitt discussed the characters of his
friends and acquaintance simply as if they were not his friends and acquaintance, and because they were so;—in other words, because they were ![]()
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the
only persons whose characters he could discuss with any foundation
of fact and truth to go upon. If we desire to know and to make known the human heart and
mind, are we to study it only in the dark, and state what we learn of it only when
everybody is out of hearing? It is only our friends and acquaintance of whom we can by
possibility know anything, of our own actual knowledge and observation: and “What can we reason but from what we know?” |
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Hazlitt carried this open and free discussion of the
moral and intellectual qualities and characteristics of our friends and intimates to a
pitch that perhaps it never before reached: but I do not call to mind that he ever carried
it beyond the legitimate bounds which it has a right to claim for itself. He used it purely
as an instrument of mental exercise and entertainment; he never sacrificed what he believed
to be the truth in the use of it. Moreover, he used it in reference to friends and foes
alike; he used it as readily in favour of those to whom it referred as against them; and he
never expected or de-![]()
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sired that anybody should feel any scruple in
using it, to the utmost extent of the truth, about himself.
At all events, what nobody who knew Hazlitt will deny is, that of all the various sources of social converse
that he was accustomed to open and draw upon, no other furnished so admirable a mixture of
instruction and amusement as the one in question. Get him to talk upon these
“personal themes,” and his fund of facts and illustrations was only surpassed
by the unequalled sagacity and acuteness with which he applied them.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
English poet and philosopher who projected
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
with William Wordsworth; author of
Biographia Literaria (1817),
On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and other
works.
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).
Charles Lamb [Elia] (1775-1834)
English essayist and boyhood friend of Coleridge at Christ's Hospital; author of
Essays of Elia published in the
London
Magazine (collected 1823, 1833) and other works.
George Mounsey (1832 fl.)
Of Staple Inn, of the firm of Mounsey and Gray, Solicitors; he was an acquaintance of
William Hazlitt. The Mounseys were a Carlisle family; “Gray” was possibly
George Mounsey Gray (1795-1881).
Bryan Waller Procter [Barry Cornwall] (1787-1874)
English poet; a contemporary of Byron at Harrow, and friend of Leigh Hunt and Charles
Lamb. He was the author of several volumes of poem and
Mirandola, a
tragedy (1821).
Robert Southey (1774-1843)
Poet laureate and man of letters whose contemporary reputation depended upon his prose
works, among them the
Life of Nelson, 2 vols (1813),
History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (1823-32) and
The Doctor, 7 vols (1834-47).
Edward White (1840 fl.)
A clerk at the East India House where he was a friend and colleague of Charles Lamb; he
was an amateur painter and connoisseur of art.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
With Coleridge, author of
Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth
survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.
