'Ever in Search of the Accidental, the Occult'

From the library I borrowed a palm-sized, well-bound, attractive volume by Louise Imogen Guiney, A Little English Gallery, published by Harper and Brothers in 1894. Smaller than a trade paperback, the book is forest-green and embossed in gold with what I thought at first were fleurs-de-lis but turn out to be torches tied with bows. It suggests a time when books were sturdy and elegant. 

Guiney collects five pieces she calls “studies,” brief biographical essays devoted to Lady Danvers, Henry Vaughan, George Farquhar, Dr. Johnson’s friends Topham Beauclerk and Bennet Langton, and William Hazlitt. Those who know Boswell know of Beauclerk and Langton. Guiney writes that they did “nothing of moment” but “to whom the world must pay honor, if only for the friendship they took and gave.” Not the shabbiest of fates, to be remembered for one’s friendship with a great man.

 

Guiney’s assessment of Hazlitt is her most interesting. She distinguishes him nicely from his friend and fellow essayist Charles Lamb, without mentioning Lamb: “There was in him absolutely nothing of the antiquary and the scholar, as the modern world understands those most serviceable gentlemen. He was a ‘surveyor,’ as he said, erroneously, of Bacon. He was continuously drawn into the byway, and ever in search of the accidental, the occult; he lusted, like Sir Thomas Browne, to find the great meanings of minor things.” That virtually describes a good essayist’s task.

 

Hazlitt can be silly, especially about women, and hot-headed. Like most writers, he’s foolish when he turns to politics. He wasted the final years of his life writing a four-volume biography of Napoleon. Yet his prose is some of the most electrifying I know. Guiney says of it:

 

“Hazlitt’s style is an incredible thing. It is not, like Lamb’s, of one warp and woof. It soars to the rhetorical sublime, and drops to hard Saxon slang. It is for all the world, and not only for specialists.”

 

Guiney singles out Hazlitt’s “On the Character Of Cobbett” for its “trenchant sweep, the simplicity and point of Newman at his best,” so I reread it and found him lauding the “the clearness and force of [Cobbett's] writings.” He continues:

 

“An argument does not stop to stagnate and muddle in his brain, but passes at once to his paper. His ideas are served up, like pancakes, hot and hot. Fresh theories give him fresh courage. He is like a young and lusty bridegroom that divorces a favourite speculation every morning, and marries a new one every night. He is not wedded to his notions, not he.”