CHRONOLOGY OF HAZLITT'S LIFE AND WRITINGS 1778 William Hazlitt born at Maidstone in Kent, April 10. 1783-1786 Residence in America. 1787 ff. Residence at Wem in Shropshire. 1793-1794 Student in the Hackney Theological College. 1798 Meeting with Coleridge and Wordsworth. 1798?-1805 Study and practice of painting. 1802 Visit to Paris. 1805 Essay on the Principles of Human Action. 1806 Free Thoughts on Public Affairs. 1807 An Abridgment of the Light of Nature Revealed, by Abraham Tucker. Reply to the Essay on Population by the Rev. T. R. Malthus. 1808 Marriage with Sarah Stoddart and settlement at Winterslow. Institution. 1812-1814 On the staff of the Morning Chronicle. 1814 Begins contributing to the Champion, Examiner, and the Edinburgh Review. 1816 Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft. 1817 The Round Table. The Characters of Shakespeare's Plays. 1818 A View of the English Stage. Lectures on the English Pocts. (Delivered at the Surrey 1819 Lectures on the English Comic Writers. (Delivered at the Surrey Institution at the close of 1818.) A Letter to William Gifford Esq., from William Hazlitt Esq. 1820 Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. (Delivered at the Surrey Institution at the close of 1819.) Joins the staff of the London Magazine. 1821-22 Table Talk, or Original Essays (2 volumes). 1822 Episode of Sarah Walker.-Journey to Scotland to obtain a divorce from his wife. 1823 Liber Amoris, or the New Pygmalion. Characteristics in the Manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims. 1824 Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England. Select British Poets. Marriage with Mrs. Bridgewater.-Tour of the Continent. 1825 The Spirit of the Age. 1826 Notes of a Journey through France and Italy. The Plain Speaker, Opinions on Books, Men, and Things (2 volumes). 1828-1830 Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (4 volumes). 1830 Conversations of James Northcote. Death of William Hazlitt, September 18. INTRODUCTION WILLIAM HAZLITT I HAZLITT characterized the age he lived in as "critical, didactic, paradoxical, romantic." 1 It was the age of the Edinburgh Review, of the Utilitarians, of Godwin and Shelley, of Wordsworth and Byron-in a word of the French Revolution and all that it brought in its train. Poetry in this age was impregnated with politics; ideas for social reform sprang from the ground of personal sentiment. Hazlitt was born early enough to partake of the ardent hopes which the last decade of the eighteenth century held out, but his spirit came to ripeness in years of reaction in which the battle for reform seemed a lost hope. While the changing events were bringing about corresponding changes in the ideals of such early votaries to liberty as Coleridge and Wordsworth, Hazlitt continued to cling to his enthusiastic faith, but at the same time the spectacle of a world which turned away from its brightest dreams made of him a sharp critic of human nature, and his sense of personal disappointment turned into a bitterness hardly to be distinguished from cynicism. In a passionate longing for a better order of things, in the merciless denunciation of the cant and bigotry which was enlisted in the cause of the existing order, he resembled Byron. The rare union in his nature of the analytic and the emo1 Dramatic Essays, VIII, 415. 1 tional gave to his writings the very qualities which he enumerated as characteristic of the age, and his consistent sincerity made his voice distinct above many others of his generation. Hazlitt's earlier years reveal a restless conflict of the sensitive and the intellectual. His father, a friend of Priestley's, was a Unitarian preacher, who, in his vain search for liberty of conscience, had spent three years in America with his family. Under him the boy was accustomed to the reading of sermons and political tracts, and on this dry nourishment he seemed to thrive till he was sent to the Hackney Theological College to begin his preparation for the ministry. His dissatisfaction there was not such as could be put into words-perhaps a hunger for keener sensations and an appetite for freer inquiry than was open to a theological student even of a dissenting church. After a year at Hackney he withdrew to his father's home, where he found nothing more definite to do than to solve some knotty point, or dip in some abstruse author, or look at the sky, or wander by the pebbled sea-side." This was probably the period of his most extensive reading. He absorbed the English novelists and essayists; he saturated himself with the sentiment of Rousseau; he studied Bacon and Hobbes and Berkeley and Hume; he became fascinated, in Burke, by the union of a wide intellect with a brilliant fancy and consummate rhetorical skill. Though he called himself at this time dumb and' inarticulate, and the idea of ever making literature his profession had not suggested itself to him, he was eager to talk about the things he read, and in Joseph Fawcett, a retired minister, he found an agreeable companion. A heartier friend or honester critic I never coped 66 66 2 On Living to One's Self," in Table Talk. "On Reading Old Books," pp. 344-45. withal." 4 "The writings of Sterne, Fielding, Cervantes, Richardson, Rousseau, Godwin, Goethe, etc. were the usual subjects of our discourse, and the pleasure I had had, in reading these authors, was more than doubled." How acutely sensitive he was to all impressions at this time is indicated by the effect upon him of the meeting with Coleridge and Wordsworth of which he has left a record in one of his most eloquent essays, "My First Acquaintance with Poets." But his active energies were concentrated on the solution of a metaphysical problem which was destined to possess his brain for many years: in his youthful enthusiasm he was grappling with a theory concerning the natural disinterestedness of the human mind, apparently adhering to the bias which he had received from his early training. But being come of age and finding it necessary to turn his mind to something more marketable than abstract speculation, he determined, though apparently without any natural inclination toward the art, to become a painter. He apprenticed himself to his brother John Hazlitt, who had gained some reputation in London for his miniatures. During the peace of Amiens in 1802, he travelled to the Louvre to study and copy the masterpieces which Napoleon had brought over from Italy as trophies of war. Here, as he "marched delighted through a quarter of a mile of the proudest efforts of the mind of man, a whole creation of genius, a universe of art," he imbibed a love of perfection which may have been fatal to his hopes of a career. At any rate it was soon after, while he was following the profession of itinerant painter through England, that he wrote to his father of "much dissatisfaction and much sorrow,' 6 "On Criticism," in Table Talk. Life of Holcroft, Works, II, 171, n. "On the Pleasure of Painting," in Table Talk. |