'You May Find Something of Almost Everything'

“Hazlitt may sometimes have adopted an opinion partly because other people did not hold it, but he never adopted an opinion because other people did hold it.”

The first half of this observation neatly describes adolescents of any age. Some of us grow up and if we pay even minimal attention to what’s in front of us, life has a way of turning us into independent realists. Self-seeking can slip away. Outrageousness loses its allure and our opinions and those of most others become unworthy of notice. My generation – the so-called Boomers – often embarrass me. (I think of William Hazlitt as a premature Baby Boomer with a magnificent prose style.)

On Friday we were talking to our son who is a second-year midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy. He noted that people his age tend to blame Baby Boomers for all the nation’s troubles, and I can’t argue except to note that subsequent generations have carried on our pioneering work. Our most lasting legacy is the legitimization of unashamed, undisguised, much aggrieved self-centeredness – thus, Hazlitt the Boomer.

The second half of the passage from George Saintsbury’s article on Hazlitt in Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 (1895) characterizes people for whom fashion holds no charm. They see no advantage in joining the herd for the sake of affability, convenience or peer-approval. Granted, there’s a price to be paid for independence. It can be hard work but you’ll have no trouble sleeping at night. After his qualifications, Saintsbury defends Hazlitt:

“In most writers, in all save the very greatest, we look for one or two, or for a few special faculties and capacities, and we know perfectly well that other (generally many other) capacities and faculties will not be found in them at all. We do not dream of finding rollicking mirth in Milton, or gorgeous embroidery of style in Swift, or unadorned simplicity in Browne. But in Hazlitt you may find something of almost everything, except the finer kinds of wit and humour; to which last, however, he makes a certain side-approach by dint of his appreciation of the irony of Nature and Fate. Almost every other grace of matter and form that can be found in prose may be found at times in his.”