William Hazlitt:The Spirit of the Age

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William Hazlitt 1778-1830

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William Hazlitt (1778-1830) at first planned to follow his

father into the Unitarian ministry, became instead a painter of portraits, then

turned to writing on philosophy, economics, and politics. In his mid thirties,

he established himself as a public lecturer and prolific contributor to

periodicals.

(sometime) friends with Charles and Mary Lamb, Wordsworth, Coleridge,

and Stendhal; also acquainted with the world of Parisian art

Frequented prostitutes –felt uncomfortable around women of his own class.

Hazlitt the essayist

criticism of English dramatists, poets, and novelists,

commentaries on painting in the England of his day,

analyses of the English theatre and its actors,

comments on the contemporary political scene

more than a hundred informal essays.

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Meeting Coleridge

“I was at that time… dumb, inarticulate,

helpless.” But because of Coleridge’s

eloquence, “my understanding did not remain

dumb and brutish,” but “at last found a

language to express itself.”

a three weeks’ visit to his home at Nether

Stowey in the Lake Country in 1798

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The Spirit of the Age The Spirit of the Age, published in 1825, began as a journalistic series for the

New Monthly Magazine. Entitled ‘Spirits of the Age’, the string of essays was

launched with ‘Jeremy Bentham’ in January 1824, ‘Rev. Mr. Irving’ in February,

The Late Mr. Home Tooke’ in March, ‘Sir Walter Scott’ in April, and ‘Lord

Eldon’ in July.

Hazlitt added 18 sketches to this group for the first edition of the book,

including essays on Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Southey, Godwin, Malthus

and Lamb. ‘Contemporary Portraits’, as the subtitle explains, of major literary

and political figures.

Why important? As a culmination of over a decade of critical endeavour,

Hazlitt's assessments of the representative figures and their impact on the age

have been very influential in shaping subsequent characterizations of

Romanticism. Romantic Conflicts

Wordsworth:

the Spirit of the Age? Critics disagree over whether Hazlitt's book is united under a single

unifying trope or person — some believe that Hazlitt meant Wordsworth

to be the figure most representative of the spirit of the age — or whether

a spirit of contradiction and resistance to simplification governs the book.

Another point of view says that The Spirit of the Age is Hazlitt's elegy for

the failure of Romantic poetry and the imaginative spirit.

Hazlitt distrusted any tendency toward abstraction, any kind of

speculative theory — philosophical, historical, scientific, religious,

economic or aesthetic — at the expense of the imaginative, the

spiritual and the poetic.

He believed that at least to some extent the age and its tendencies shape

the imaginative capacity of its people. Romantic Conflicts

Men Only? Hazlitt’s was a masculine vision of Romanticism - now much questioned

and criticised for what it downgrades in importance or leaves out.

Hazlitt himself knew he would attract criticism for his firm views: in an

1826 essay ‘On Knowledge of the World’ he complains about the

neglect of The Spirit of the Age:

‘If you do not attach yourself to some one set of people and

principles, and stick to them through thick and thin, instead of

giving your opinion fairly and fully all round, you must expect to

have all the world against you, for no other reason than because

you express yourself sincerely.’

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Hazlitt's method is different for each

individual portrait; an intuitive style, even

haphazard? ‘descriptions of physical

appearance, dress, and personal habits

jostle with philosophical analysis, critical

commentary, and anecdotal reportage’.

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The character and quality

of genius In his essay from Table-Talk, ‘On Genius and Common Sense’, Hazlitt defines genius or

originality as ‘some strong quality in the mind, answering to and bringing out some new and striking quality in nature’ (Howe, VIII, 42)

In The Spirit of the Age Scott's prose novels and romances come closest to embodying this kind of genius. Scott has achieved the ability to ‘borrow of others’ and in so doing has ‘enriched his own genius with everlasting variety, truth, and freedom’ and has enriched his audience with ‘a new edition of human nature’ (Howe, XI, 61, 64). Hence, Scott, like Shakespeare, has the potential to lose his authorial-self in his subject.

On the other hand, there is what Hazlitt identifies as ‘genius in ordinary’, a genius which is exclusive, self-willed, egotistical, and reflects the author more than the object he looks upon (‘On Genius’, Howe, VIII, 42). This kind of genius Hazlitt finds typical of Wordsworth, who ‘stamps [his] character, that deep individual interest, on whatever he meets’, which in Lyrical Ballads includes ingrafting ‘his own conscious reflections on the casual thought of hinds and shepherds’ (Howe, XI, 89).

Between these two definitive poles, however, Hazlitt comprehends many varieties of genius.

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Coleridge’s ‘unfocused

genius’Hazlitt dwells on the foibles of unfocused

genius as he sees them manifested in

Coleridge's aborted career.

In an age when the ‘accumulation of

knowledge’ has surpassed all that has gone

before and ‘distracts and dazzles the

looker-on’ (29), Hazlitt reasons that it is

understandable that Coleridge, with his

‘tangential mind’ and an understanding

‘fertile, subtle, expansive … beyond all

living precedent’, touches on all subjects,

but rests on none (Howe, XI, 29).

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Conservatives and Reformers

Another central theme in The Spirit of the Age is

the opposition between anti-Jacobin

politicians and writers and their reformist

counterparts. Two representatives of the anti-

Jacobin camp are George Canning (1770–1827)

and William Gifford (1756–1826).

Both were writers for the newspaper the Anti-

Jacobin; or, Weekly Examiner (1797–8), and both

were associated in later years with the conservative

Quarterly Review.Romantic Conflicts

Reason vs. the Imagination

Another theme which is central to Hazlitt's spirit of the age is reason vs. the

imagination.

For Hazlitt any creed, dogma, theory or system, when it restricted feeling and

man's imaginative spirit, was a threat to the individual's awareness of his

relation to the rest of humanity.

His portraits of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and Thomas Malthus (1766–

1834) represent the danger of theories that are taken to extremes.

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Bentham, Malthus

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The development of man's imaginative spirit was, Hazlitt believed, one

way to offset the bias of the age toward reason in all its forms as it denied

man's affective nature.

In ‘On Genius and Common Sense’ Hazlitt defines the imagination as ‘the

power of carrying on a given feeling into other situations, which must be done

best according to the hold which the feeling itself has taken of the mind’

(Howe, VIII, 42).

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Literary Magazines After the Regency’s highly politicized culture, the journals of the 1820s aimed

at ordinariness. The greatest of their innovations was a sense of place.

In the 1810s satires appeared, by Byron, Hunt, Moore, Horace Smith, and

Peacock: these made no attempt to portray “literary London” as realizable

people moving about real streets.

The New Monthly, Blackwood’s and the London Magazine were already in the early

1820s shaping post-Romantic culture - became the main initiators of a culture

which we might now call “Romantic,”

Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine featured occasional pieces from some of the

best journalists of the day, including Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Lamb.

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The London picked up from the New Monthly an eye for the star journalist as literary celebrity. It poached Hazlitt, featuring in its first number a series of his highly personal essays, “Table Talk,” in imitation of the same writer’s “Round Table” a few years before in the New Monthly.

In the next few years it ran the “Essays of Elia,” by Lamb, and De Quincey’sConfessions of an English Opium Eater.

The London testifed to a new belief in being literary for its own sake. (It did not cover, onlylisted, books on antiquities, science, law, political economy, and theology).

Before 1820 - no writing like Hazlitt’s opening to his essay “The Fight” (New Monthly, February 1821), where he describes his walk down Chancery Lane one damp evening, looking for someone sharing his passion for “the Fancy” to tell him the time and place of the fight. Romantic Conflicts