Part 2

“To see the golden sun, the azure sky, the outstretched ocean; to walk upon the green earth, and be lord of a thousand creatures; to look down yawning precipices or over distant sunny vales; to see the world spread out under one’s feet on a map; to bring the stars near; to view the smallest insects through a microscope; to read history, and consider the revolutions of empire and the successions of generations; to hear of the glory of Tyre, of Sidon, of Babylon, and of Susa, and to say all these were before me and are now nothing; to say I exist in such a point of time and in such a point of space; to be a spectator and a part of its ever-moving scene; to witness the change of season, of spring and autumn, of winter and summer; to feel heat and cold, pleasure and pain, beauty and deformity, right and wrong; to be sensible to the accidents of nature; to consider the mighty world of eye and ear; to listen to the stock-dove’s notes amid the forest deep; to journey over moor and mountain; to hear the midnight sainted choir; to visit lighted halls, or the cathedral’s gloom, or sit in crowded theatres and see life itself mocked; to study the works of art and refine the sense of beauty to agony; to worship fame, and to dream of immortality; to look upon the Vatican, and to read Shakespeare; to gather up the wisdom of the ancients, and to pry into the future; to listen to the trump of war, the shout of victory; to question history as to the movements of the human heart; to seek for truth; to plead the cause of humanity; to overlook the world as if time and nature poured their treasures at our feet--to be and to do all this, and then in a moment to be nothing!”

“To look upon the Vatican, and to read Shakespeare!” Once more we are reminded of Keats, a man very different from Hazlitt in many ways, but, like him, “a near neighbor to himself,” and a worshiper of beauty. “Things real,” says Keats, “such as existences of sun, moon and stars--and passages of Shakespeare.”

Hazlitt’s nature was peculiarly intense, with the very slightest admixture of those saner and commoner elements that keep our poor humanity, in its ordinary manifestations, comparatively reasonable and sweet. His years, from what we read of them, seem to have passed in one long state of feverishness. He cannot have been a pleasant man either for himself or for any one else to live with. Self-absorbed, irascible, and proud, with little or no gift of humor (sentimentalists as a class seem to be deficient in this quality, the case of Sterne to the contrary notwithstanding; and Sterne’s humor is perhaps only an additional reason for suspecting that his fine sentiments were mostly literary), he had a splendid capacity for hating, and was possessed of a kind of ugly courage that made it easy for him to speak with extraordinary plainness of other men’s defects. If the men happened to be his friends, so much the better. He professed, indeed, to like a friend all the more for having “faults that one could talk about.” “Put a pen in his hand,” says Mr. Birrell, “and he would say anything.” Whatever he said or did, suffered or enjoyed, it was all with a kind of passion. As the common saying is, there was no halfway work with him. It could never be complained of him, as he complained of some other writer, that his sentences wanted impetus. He understood the value of surprise, and never balked at an extreme statement. Thus he would say, in the coolest manner imaginable, “It is utterly impossible to persuade an editor that he is nobody.” As if it really were! As if it were not ten times nearer impossible to persuade a contributor that _he_ is nobody!

On his way to the famous prize-fight,--famous because he was there,--spending the night at an inn crowded with the “Fancy,” he overheard a “tall English yeoman” holding forth to those about him concerning “rent, and taxes, and the price of corn.” One of his hearers ventured at a certain point to interpose an objection, whereupon the yeoman bore down upon him with the word, “Confound it, man, don’t be insipid.” “Thinks I to myself,” says Hazlitt, “that’s a good phrase.” And so it was, and quite in his own line. “There is no surfeiting on gall,” he remarks somewhere, with admirable truth. He wrote an essay upon “Cant and Hypocrisy,” another upon “Disagreeable People,” and another upon the “Pleasure of Hating.” And he knew whereof he spake. Sentimentalism--the Hazlitt brand of it, at any rate--is nothing like sweetened water. “If any one wishes to see me quite calm,” he says, in his emphatic manner, “they may cheat me in a bargain, or tread upon my toes; but a truth repelled, a sophism repeated, totally disconcerts me, and I lose all patience. I am not, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, a good-natured man.” “Lamb,” he once remarked, “yearns after and covets what soothes the frailty of human nature.” So did not Hazlitt. Lamb delighted in people as such. Even their foibles--especially their foibles, it would be truer to say--were pleasant to him. In short, he was a humorist. Hazlitt’s first interest, on the other hand, seems to have been in places and things,--including books and pictures,--and his own thoughts about them. Of human beings he liked personages, so called, men who have done something,--actors, painters, authors, statesmen, and the like. As for the common run of his foolish fellow-mortals, if their frailties were to be stroked, by all means let it be done the wrong way. The operation might be less acceptable to the patient, but it would probably do him more good, and would certainly be more amusing to the operator and the lookers-on.

No doubt the man experienced now and then a reaction from his prevailing condition of feverishness. He must have had moods, we may guess, when he saw the beauty and comfort of a quieter way of life. Indeed, he has left one inimitable portrait of a character the exact reverse of his own, a portrait drawn not bitterly nor grudgingly, but in something not altogether unlike the affectionately quizzical spirit of Lamb himself. He calls it the character of a bookworm.

“The person I mean,” he says, “has an admiration for learning, if he is only dazzled by its light. He lives among old authors, if he does not enter much into their spirit. He handles the covers, and turns over the page, and is familiar with the names and dates. He is busy and self-involved. He hangs like a film and cobweb upon letters, or is like the dust upon the outside of knowledge, which should not be rudely brushed aside. He follows learning as its shadow; but as such, he is respectable. He browses on the husk and leaves of books, as the young fawn browses on the bark and leaves of trees. Such a one lives all his life in a dream of learning, and has never once had his sleep broken by a real sense of things. He believes implicitly in genius, truth, virtue, liberty, because he finds the names of these things in books. He thinks that love and friendship are the finest things imaginable, both in practice and theory. The legend of good women is to him no fiction.[2] When he steals from the twilight of his cell, the scene breaks upon him like an illuminated missal, and all the people he sees are but so many figures in a _camera obscura_. He reads the world, like a favorite volume, only to find beauties in it, or like an edition of some old work which he is preparing for the press, only to make emendations in it, and correct the errors that have inadvertently slipt in. He and his dog Tray are much the same honest, simple-hearted, faithful, affectionate creatures--if Tray could but read! His mind cannot take the impression of vice; but the gentleness of his nature turns gall to milk. He would not hurt a fly. He draws the picture of mankind from the guileless simplicity of his own heart; and when he dies, his spirit will take its smiling leave, without ever having had an ill thought of others, or the consciousness of one in itself!”

It would have been for Hazlitt’s happiness, or at least for his comfort, if he had possessed a grain or two of his bookworm’s “guileless simplicity.” But things must be as they must. His name was not Nathanael. He was “dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,” and it was not in his nature to be patient and easy-going, especially where anything so vitally essential as a difference of opinion touching the character of Napoleon Bonaparte was concerned. He had the qualities of his defects. If he was sometimes too peppery, he was never insipid.

Men write best of matters in which they are most interested and most at home, and of Hazlitt we may say, speaking a little cynically, after his own manner, that with all his multiplicity of topics, he wrote best about his own feelings and his neighbors’ infirmities, though as for the latter sort of material, to be sure, he did not confine himself very strictly to that with which his fellow men furnished him. Proud as he was, indeed (and here we may note another characteristic of the sentimentalist), he had sometimes a really shocking lack of decent personal reserve. During his infatuation with Miss Sarah Walker, as all the world--or all the Hazlitt world--knows, he could not keep his tongue in his head. He would even buttonhole a stranger on a street corner, and unbosom his woes to him at full length in most unmanly fashion: how he loved the girl, and how the girl would not love him, and so on, and so on. And having perpetrated this almost incredible absurdity, he would tell of it afterward; and then, to make matters still worse, when he had recovered from his distemper (always a rapid process in his case), he wrote a book about it. This book is reprinted, all in fair type, in the latest and handsomest edition of his works; but, thank Heaven, we are none of us bound to read it. Nor need we take the whole miserable business too seriously, as if (except on its literary side) it were anything so very far out of the common. It was ridiculous, of course; but so are the love affairs of elderly men generally. Their folly has passed into a proverb. As wise old Izaak Walton--who had two excellent wives of his own, both “of distinguished clerical connexion”--long ago expressed it, “love is a flattering mischief,” “a passion that carries us to commit errors with as much ease as whirlwinds move feathers.” The good man’s assonance would have driven Flaubert insane, but his doctrine is consolatory. A feather may surely be excused for slipping its cable before a whirlwind.

It was only a year or two after the conclusion of this distressing episode that Hazlitt, being in Italy, wrote one of the most delightful of his essays, the one upon a sun-dial.

“_Horas non numero nisi serenas_ is the motto of a sun-dial near Venice,”--so he begins. Then, after descanting upon the exceeding beauty and appropriateness of the Latin words, he falls foul of the French people for the “less _sombre_ and less edifying” turn that they are accustomed to give to similar matters. He has seen a clock in Paris bearing a figure of Time seated in a boat, which Cupid is rowing along, with the motto, _L’Amour fait passer le Temps_; a motto that the French wits, it appears, have travestied into _Le Temps fait passer L’Amour_. This is ingenious, he concedes (how could he help it?), but it lacks sentiment. “I like people,” he declares, “who have something that they love, and something that they hate.” The French “never arrive at the classical--or the romantic.” The criticism may or may not be just (it seems a hard saying), but what the average reader of the paragraph is likely to be thinking of, if he happens to be familiar with the story of Hazlitt’s own adventures with Cupid, is not any weakness of the French people, but the amusing cleverness with which the Parisian wits have hit off the weakness of a certain literary Englishman. Truly _Le Temps fait passer L’Amour_,--sometimes with deplorable celerity,--on both sides of the Channel.

Naturally, however, nothing of this sort occurred to Hazlitt. His good memory was like the sun-dial,--it counted none but the bright hours. By this time he had almost forgotten both his unhappy passion and the unhappier book that he wrote about it.

And, indeed, it is time that _we_ forgot them. For one who has found his profit in strolling up and down in Hazlitt’s essays at odd hours for half a lifetime, it is little becoming to talk overmuch about the man’s personal imperfections. It matters little to any of us now that his temper was bad; that his passions too often betrayed him into folly; that his faculties lacked a certain balance; that his _mal de rêverie_, whether born with him or caught from his French master, sometimes ran too feverish a course; that, in short, he had the not unusual weaknesses of super-sensitive men. What does matter is that at his best he wrote English prose as comparatively few have written it, and in doing so said a world of bright and memorable things that no one else could have said so well, even if it had ever occurred to any one else to say them at all. If he was difficult to live with, that is a question more than seventy years out of date; and no competent reader ever brought a similar accusation against his essays. It has been said of them more than once, to be sure, that they are not so good as Lamb’s; but then, you may say that of all essays; and really the comparison is futile, not to call it foolish. The men were nothing alike; though even so, we may gladly agree with Mr. Henley’s comment, that, as “dissimilars,” they “go gallantly and naturally together--_par nobile fratrum_.”

Perhaps Hazlitt sometimes wrote too much in haste, with hardly sufficient care for those minute excellences that go to the making of perfection, though he could talk edifyingly under that head, and appears to have been the author of the clever parody, more clever than true,--as cleverness is apt to be,--

“Learn to write slow: all other graces Will follow in their proper places;”

and it may be, as one of the cleverest of his admirers assures us, that he was “really too witty.” Concerning points so nice as these, it is hard for “honest and painful men” to feel certain. Haste has the compensatory virtue of generating heat, while as for the having too much wit, it is like having too much money, or more than one’s share of personal beauty; serious misfortunes, both of them, beyond a doubt (every one says so), but misfortunes to be put up with, at a pinch, in a spirit of Christian resignation. All things considered, too much is perhaps better than too little, and, for better or worse, excess on both sides of the line is rather Hazlitt’s “note.” Of the virtues of courage and obstinacy he possessed enough for two. We applaud, even while we pity, to see how, all his life long, he stood up for what he believed to be the truth, in spite of the frowns, and worse than frowns, of all who in that day had it in their power to blast the career of men in his profession. He was defamed and abused, for political reasons,--all for that unlucky Bonapartean bee in his bonnet,--as few men of letters have ever been, and to the last he did not haul down his flag. Let so much be said in his honor. And whatever else is forgotten, let the words of Charles Lamb be remembered: “I should belie my own conscience if I said less than that I think W. H. to be in his natural and healthy state one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing.” The most virtuous of those who blame him may count themselves happy ever to receive half so handsome a tribute from so authoritative a source. Human nature is a tangled skein; moral perfection is not to be encountered every day, even among critics. To do one’s main stint well is probably as much as most of us can reasonably hope for; and so much, assuredly, Hazlitt did; for his main work, as we see it, was the writing of his few volumes of critical and miscellaneous essays. Into these he put the breath of long life. These are what count, seventy years after. Whoever begins with them, recurs to them. Not one of them but comes under Lamb’s heading of “take-downable.”

As a matter of course, however, being a man of active mind and having his living to make by his pen, he wrote many things besides these. He began, indeed, with a metaphysical treatise,--a child of his youth (he believed it a great discovery) for which he never ceased to cherish an excusable fondness. This, on the authority of those who have read it, or have talked with some who have done so, we take to be a rather difficult and innutritious choke-pear, something to be safely left alone by ordinary seekers after knowledge. Then, toward the end of his career, he produced a four-volume life of Napoleon, which, on equally good authority, we should think to have been a kind of anticipation or foreshadowing of the modern “novel with a purpose.” His latest editors go so far as to leave it out of their fine twelve-volume edition of his works. Somewhere between these two attempts at immortality he indulged himself in a book on grammar, intended especially to correct the errors of Lindley Murray, more particularly, we believe, his faulty definition of a noun as the name of an object. Fortunately or otherwise, this work (every author of consequence has at least one such) never got beyond the original (manuscript) edition. The making of it seems a queer freak for a man of Hazlitt’s turn of mind; but then, as Mr. Birrell observes, “grammar has its fascinations; and even such men as John Milton and John Wesley, no less than William Cobbett and William Hazlitt, succumbed to its charm.” And he might have added a name more illustrious still,--the name of Julius Cæsar.

All these longer works (including a “Reply to Malthus”) we consider ourselves, as readers, at full liberty to skip. Furthermore, we consider their merits or demerits to have no bearing whatever upon the question of their author’s standing as an essayist. Like every man who practices an art, he is entitled to be judged, not by his experiments and failures, but by his successes. Wordsworth might have written a thousand “Ecclesiastical Sonnets,” instead of only one hundred and thirty odd, and every one of them might have been less imaginative than the one before it, without making him any the less a true and noble poet. For a poet, like the Pope, is infallible only when he is inspired; at other times he may nod as well as another man. Moreover, in the case of the poet, at least, the man himself may not be sure whether or not, at any given moment, the divine afflatus is upon him. It was Doctor Johnson, a poet himself, and the biographer of poets, who said that it was easy enough to make verses; he had made a hundred in a day; the difficulty was to know when you had made a good one. And the same difficulty, in a less degree, is encountered by the maker of prose essays. It is a wise father that knows his own child. Nor in such a matter have a man’s contemporaries any great advantage over the man himself. The folly of their judgments is proverbial. It is necessary to wait. Apparently there is some strange virtue in the mere lapse of time. “Time will tell,” the common people say; and the scholar has no better wisdom. Hazlitt must stand his trial with the rest. Sooner or later the years will render their verdict, though none of us may live long enough to hear it. The best that can be said now is, that so far the balloting seems to be strongly in his favor.

EDWARD FITZGERALD

EDWARD FITZGERALD

“I have been reading a good deal, but not much in the way of knowledge.” So the future translator of Omar Khayyám wrote to a friend in 1832, being then twenty-three years old, and two years out of the University. The words may be taken as fairly descriptive of the remaining fifty years of his life. He was always reading something, but not with an eye to rank or scholarship. His old friends and school-fellows one after another stepped into high place. Tennyson, Thackeray, and Carlyle were names on every tongue; Spedding, less talked about, was deep in a _magnum opus_; Thompson, Donne, Peacock, Allen, and Cowell held positions of honor in church or college; but FitzGerald had buried himself of set purpose in an insignificant, out-of-the-way Suffolk village, and, by his own account of himself, was dozing away his years in “visionary inactivity,”--in “the enjoyment of old childish habits and sympathies.”

Not less truly than his mates, however, as it now appears, he was living his own life; and perhaps not less truly than the foremost of them he was to come into lasting renown. Such are the “diversities of operations,” through which the spirit of man develops and discloses itself.

FitzGerald came of an eccentric family. “We are all mad,” he wrote; and his own share of the ancestral inheritance--mostly of an amiable and amusing sort--early made itself evident. While he was at Cambridge, his mother drove up to the college gate in her coach and four, and sent for him to come down and see her; but he could not go,--his only pair of shoes was at the cobbler’s. The Suffolk friend, from whom we have this anecdote, adds that to the last FitzGerald was perfectly careless of dress. “I can see him now,” he says, “walking down into Woodbridge, with an old Inverness cape, a double-breasted flowered satin waistcoat, slippers on his feet, and a handkerchief, very likely, tied over his hat.” It was odd, no doubt, that a gentleman should dress in so unconventional a manner; but it was much odder that he should write to Mrs. Kemble a fortnight after the death of his brother, in 1879: “I say but little of my brother’s death. We were very good friends, of very different ways of thinking; I had not been within side his lawn gates (three miles off) these dozen years (no fault of his), and I did not enter them at his funeral--which you will very likely--and properly--think wrong.” Only an eccentric man could have had occasion to say that; and surely none but a very eccentric man _would_ have said it.

After leaving the University,--at which, by the way, he barely obtained his degree,--he went to Paris (where he had spent part of his boyhood), but stayed only a month or two; and on his return, having just passed his majority, he wrote to Allen, “Tell Thackeray that he is never to invite me to his house, as I intend never to go.” He would rather go there than anywhere else, to be sure; but he has got “all sorts of Utopian ideas” about society into his head, and is “going to become a great bear.” In another man’s mouth this might have been merely the expression of a passing whim; but whether FitzGerald meant the words seriously or not, they were pretty accurately fulfilled. His friends were of the noblest and truest, and his affection for them was of the warmest and stanchest, no man’s more so; but he chose to live apart.