'I Laugh, I Run, I Leap, I Sing for Joy'

As readers we are spoiled. We can be petty, ungrateful and unfair in our judgments. Shakespeare had the nerve to unload Titus Andronicus on us? Ralph Ellison published only one novel? We take their “failings” personally. In his Hours in a Library (1874-79), Leslie Stephen puts it like this: 

“The writer, we feel, is better than his work. His full power only reveals itself by flashes. There are blemishes in his design, due to mere oversight or indolence; his energy has flagged, or he has alloyed his pure gold to please the mob; or some burst of wayward passion has disturbed the fair proportions of his work, and the man himself is a half-finished or half-ruined fragment.”

 

How condescending we can be, so eager to be disappointed and thus feel superior. For some, sophistication means never being satisfied. Think of the wealth we are given, free of cost, free of any obligation but to enjoy ourselves. “Hamlet is a pretty good performance,” Stephen writes, “if we make allowances; but what would it have been if Shakespeare could have been at his highest level all through, and if every element of strength in him had been purified from every weakness? What would it have been, shall we say, if he could have had the advantage of reading a few modern lectures on aesthetics?” Reading as a species of snobbish presentism. A refusal to want not the book in our hands but the one the writer should have written.

 

Stephen’s sarcastic protest comes from his chapter devoted to William Hazlitt, a writer easy to nitpick. He was ornery, quarrelsome and stupid about women. His politics were often childish and he spent his final years writing a four-volume life of Napoleon. Stephen refers to “Hazlitt’s glowing Essays,” and yet proceeds to misread the essayist in precisely the way he has condemned in others. He misguidedly suggests Hazlitt is a lesser writer than his druggie contemporaries Coleridge and De Quincey. At his best, Hazlitt possessed the journalist’s gift of close observation wedded to spirited prose that brings those details to life. Robert Louis Stevenson insisted that “none of us can write like Hazlitt,” and wrote of “On Going a Journey” that it is “so good that there should be a tax levied on all who have not read it.” The essay Stevenson cites is among Hazlitt’s most joyful and least cranky:

 

“Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner -- and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy. From the point of yonder rolling cloud, I plunge into my past being and revel there, as the sunburnt Indian plunges headlong into the wave that wafts him to his native shore.”

 

Reading Hazlitt at his best is like earning a graduate degree in the art of prose – as if such a thing ever existed.

 

Hazlitt was born on this date, April 10, in 1778.