William Hazlitt: Process or Result? - part I

[Sitaram]

"I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild
beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the
human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began. "

spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRhazlitt.htm


While in London Hazlitt became friends with a group of writers with
radical political ideas. The group included Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, Thomas
Barnes, Henry Brougham, Leigh Hunt, Robert Southey and Lord Byron.

At first Hazlitt attempted to become a portrait painter but after a lack
of success he turned to writing

lupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHaz.htm[/url]

On Colerige:

"His Ancient Mariner is his most remarkable performance, and the
only one that I could point out to anyone as giving an adequate idea
of his great natural powers. ... He talked on for ever; and you wished
him to talk on for ever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour
and effort; but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings
of his imagination lifted him from off his feet."

pickeringchatto.com/hazlittintro.htm

On Qualifications for Success in Life:

"Fortune does not always smile on merit ... the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong ... To be thought wise, it is for the most
part only necessary to seem so; and the noisy demagogue is easily
translated, by the popular voice, into the orator and patriot. ... Men
are in numberless instances qualified for certain things, for no other
reason than because they are qualified for nothing else. ... a dull
plodding fellow will often do better than one of a more mercurial and
fiery cast - the mere unconsciousness of his own deficiencies, or of
any thing beyond what he himself can do, reconciles him to his
mechanical progress, and enables him to perform all that lies in his
power with labour and patience. By being content with mediocrity, he
advances beyond it; whereas the man of greater taste or genius may
be supposed to fling down his pen or pencil in despair, haunted with
the idea of unattainable excellence, and ends in being nothing,
because he cannot be every thing at once."

[Sitaram]

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blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Literary/Hazlitt.htm

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Hazlitt's Essay On Hamlet

shakespearean.org.uk/ham1-haz.htm
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ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/prstlyjb/hazlitt/chap4.htm
When he began writing about the theatre, Hazlitt was just in time to
salute the genius of Edmund Kean, who owed much to his
enthusiastic notices. Years later, when Kean was being hooted off the
stage, Hazlitt made a one-man cavalry charge at the mob:
'Let a great man but "fall into misfortunes" and then you discover the
real dispositions of the loving public towards their pretended idol. See
how they set upon him the moment he is down, how they watch for
the smallest slip, the first pretext to pick a quarrel with him, how slow
they are to acknowledge any worth, how quick to exaggerate an error,
how ready to trample upon and tear "to tatters, to very rags" the
frailties which being flesh and blood he has in common with all men,
while yet they overlook or malign the incomparable excellence which
they can neither reach nor find a substitute for....

[Ron Price]

British essayist, William Hazlitt, defined poetry in the opening sentence of his essay On Poetry as “the natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.” He wrote these words between the birth of the Bab in 1819 and the birth of Baha’u’llah in 1817. He added that poetry “relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure…to the human mind…..and (poetry) has been the study and delight of mankind in all ages. “Wherever there is a sense of beauty, or power, or harmony, as in the motion of a wave of the sea, in the growth of a flower that 'spreads its sweet leaves to the air, and dedicates its beauty to the sun', ----there is poetry, in its birth.”
Hazlitt said many things about poetry in his essay, too many to quote here; but I will add several points from his essay before I conclude. “If history is a grave study,” he says, “poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper and are spread wider. “There is no thought or feeling that can have entered into the mind of man which he would be eager to communicate to others, or which they would listen to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry…..it is 'the stuff of which our life is made'.” The rest is 'mere oblivion', a dead letter: all that is worth remembering in life is the poetry of life. 1

Poetry shows us an object, a thing,
and throws a sparkling radiance all
around it. It is, for me, the inmost
recesses of thought, penetrates being,
puts a spirit of life and motion into
the universe, describes the flowing
and the fixed, raises the mind, hurries
it into sublimity and I too find it so.

My poetry is one in which I stand
on the threshold of a new age
indebted to a new Revelation,
its fixed gaze and steady wings;
it produces not a sparkling flame
or some sullen heat, but kindles
the lamp of my spirit and around
me are these stagnant waters of
a briny lake, obscure intricacies
of knowledge, the God of my
passions and that veil that is
always cast over my eyes.

1This prose-poem draws on an essay by William Hazlitt. It served as an introduction to his work Lectures on the English Poets first published in 1818.

Ron Price 30 March 2007