'Enlightened Spectators'

In his 1825 essay “On Old English Writers and Speakers,” William Hazlitt rather uncharacteristically waves the Union Jack in rousing defense of English literature in contrast to the French. He begins by browsing a Paris bookstall and seeing French books stacked “to the height of twenty or thirty volumes.” He goes on (and on):

“There is scarcely such a thing as an English book to be met with, unless, perhaps, a dusty edition of [Samuel Richardson’s] Clarissa Harlowe lurks in an obscure corner, or a volume of [Laurence Sterne’s] the Sentimental Journey perks its well-known title in your face.”

Seldom has prose mastery been so wedded to crankiness, but that’s part of Hazlitt’s charm. He’s passionate about almost everything. What distinguishes him from run-of-the-mill ranters is the deftness of his language. The essay continues:

“We sympathise less, however, with the pompous and set speeches in the tragedies of Racine and Corneille, or in the serious comedies of Moliere, than we do with the grotesque farces of the latter, with the exaggerated descriptions and humour of Rabelais (whose wit was a madness, a drunkenness), or with the accomplished humanity, the easy style, and gentlemanly and scholar-like sense of Montaigne. But these we consider as in a great measure English, or as what the old French character inclined to, before it was corrupted by courts and academies of criticism.”

Hazlitt has the gall (sorry) to make the French essayist a sort of honorary Englishman. It’s almost as though he were precognitive. His son, also named William Hazlitt, would edit and publish Montaigne’s Complete Works in the Charles Cotton translation in 1842. William Carew Hazlitt, the essayist’s grandson, revised his father’s edition in 1877.

Clearly, the paterfamilias is a lineal descendent of the great Frenchman. In his 1819 essay “On the Periodical Essayists.” Hazlitt writes:

“There is no one to whom the old Latin adage is more applicable than to Montaigne, Pereant isti qui ante nos nostra dixerunt [“May they perish, who said first what we were going to say.”]. There has been no new impulse given to thought since his time.”

The ideal essay, Hazlitt writes, “ . . . takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shews us what we are, and what we are not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened spectators of its many-colored scenes, enables us (if possible) to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to perform a part.”

At the conclusion of the “On Old English Writers” essay, Hazlitt generalizes and returns to his patriotic theme:

“Man, whatever he may think, is a very limited being; the world is a narrow circle drawn about him; the horizon limits our immediate view; immortality means a century or two. Languages happily restrict the mind to what is of its own native growth and fitted for it, as rivers and mountains bound countries; or the empire of learning, as well as states, would become unwieldy and overgrown. A little importation from foreign markets may be good; but the home production is the chief thing to be looked to.” 

Hazlitt was born on this date, April 10, in 1778, and died in 1830 at age fifty-two.

[A recommendation: I rely on Selected Essays of William Hazlitt (Nonesuch Press, 1934). It’s a sturdy hardcover with legible print and an excellent selection of essays by Sir Geoffrey Keynes, a surgeon and literary scholar.]