The life of William Hazlitt

Preface

This book is an attempt to present in clear outline, and with reasonable attention to detail, a narrative of what has been termed the " rather imperfectly known life " of a great English man of letters. In seeking to render it a little less imperfectly known I have not spared any pains, and I have not, I believe, sought to evade any difficulties. Since a good deal which has hitherto been believed of Hazlitt has proved itself to be not altogether worthy of credence, and since a good deal more is told in these pages for the first time, I have thought it better not to recast the narrative in my own words, but to present it as far as possible in those of the various witnesses. If this method has disadvantages, of which I am conscious, it will be found also, I hope, to have certain advantages, not the least of which is that everything which appears in this book bears its own authority, good or less good, on its face. In a life the groundwork of which has already been fixed this would not be a matter of so much importance, but a life of Hazlitt is still after a hundred years in the nature of a pioneer work. It is so, at least, that I have regarded it, and if on my groundwork a more attractive and lasting superstructure is one day erected I shall be the last to complain.

My acknowledgments for sympathy and encouragement are many, and are due first of all to Miss Hazlitt, greatgrand-daughter of my subject, who by freely and generously throwing open to me all the works of her father, the late Mr. William Carew Hazlitt, in which the rights are held by herself, has rendered me assistance with which I could not possibly have dispensed. Owing to the bequest to the British Museum of the whole of the late Mr. Hazlitt's materials which have remained in this country, I have been able to check his conclusions at nearly every point, and in one or two instances to put right errors into which I find he has unwittingly fallen. With the sanction of the Trustees of Dr. Williams' Library I have made my

PREFACE

copy of Crabb Robinson's evidence direct from the diaries and letters in their charge, and to Mr. E. V. Lucas I am grateful for permission to make my Lamb quotations from his text. For reply to inquiries, involving research on my behalf in varying degrees, I am indebted, among others, to Professor Ernest Weekley, of Nottingham University ; to the Public Librarians of Liverpool and Taunton ; and to the Secretary of the Royal Academy. My collaborator in the matter of the illustrations has been Mr. J. H. Allchin of the Maidstone Museum, to whom, and to whose Committee, I tender my thanks. The portraits in this book, with a single exception (the self-portrait mentioned on p. 65, which is in the Maidstone Museum, but in a state of preservation which unfits it for reproduction) I believe to be complete, and the frontispiece is from a painting which has not hitherto been reproduced.

Hazlitt, it may be remarked, was not by temperament a letter-writer, and to the forty-odd examples of his correspondence which have been hitherto known, (excluding the somewhat specialised Liber Amoris group), I have succeeded in adding eighteen. With the exception of the group mentioned, which may be conveniently studied in its own place, every letter of Hazlitt will be found, or will be found quoted, in the course of this book. I cannot conclude this note without an acknowledgment of the value of the work done in the same field by Mr. A. R. Waller and the late Arnold Glover, editors of the Collected Works, and that of M. Jules Douady, author of the best Hazlitt bibliography and of the French " Life." While I have accepted none of the conclusions of these writers without first going over the ground for myself, I have at many points been conscious of the assistance their labours have rendered me.

P. P. H.

VI

Contents

CHAPTER PAGB

IV. Painting and Writing (1803-1807) 68 V. Interregnum (1808-1811) 104

VII. The Journalist (ii) (1815-1816) 178 VIII. The Journalist (iii) (1817) 217

Chapter One : Beginnings (1778—1795)

For my part, I set out in life with the French Revolution.

On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth.

The name Hazlitt, though not a common one, has a well recorded history, and we need not go so far afield for it as has sometimes been suggested. Belonging to that largest class of surnames which are local in origin, its earliest occurrence, in the thirteenth century, is in the form de Heselenheved, denoting residence in the Yorkshire hamlet of that name, now Hazlehead Bridge, near Penistone. In the fifteenth century the name becomes Hesilheved and in the sixteenth Haslehead, which is contracted into Haslett or Hazlitt in accordance with a practice of which Aikitt (Scotch, aik, oak), Birkett, (north country, birk, birch), Bromet (broom), are kindred examples. It happens that the records of the name here traced confine themselves to Yorkshire and Cumberland, but that there were also Hasletts and Hazlitts who were Scotch (the etymological origin of their name remaining the same) we receive assurance from the existing place names of Hazlehead, Aberdeen, and Hesselhead, Ayrshire. From Scotland, no doubt, rather than from northern England, the name was carried to Ulster, where we find it established early in the seventeenth century. The proposed Dutch origin of the name (Haesluyt) may, in the opinion of Professor Ernest Weekley, be finally disposed of.

By the opening of the eighteenth century a branch of the family had removed from Ulster to the south, and A 1 in 1737 William, the eldest son of John and Margaret Hazlitt, was born at the village of Shronell, county Tipperary. Leaving his father's farm, " a poor Irish lad," at the age of eighteen to prepare himself for the Presbyterian ministry, the elder Hazlitt graduated at Glasgow University, joined the Unitarians, and was appointed to the ministry of Wisbeach in Cambridgeshire. Here, in his twenty-ninth year, he married Grace Loftus, nine years his junior and the daughter of an ironmonger in the marketplace. A move was made to Marshfield near Bath, and in 1770 to Maidstone. At Maidstone during ten years the Rev. William Hazlitt enjoyed the respect of a wider circle than his congregation : he was the friend and correspondent of Doctors Priestley and Price, and an acquaintance during his English residence of Benjamin Franklin. On April 10, 1778, his fourth child William was born, who is the subject of these pages. A son John was aged eleven at this date, a daughter Margaret seven : it is to a narrative written late in life by the latter and based on her father's journals that we owe our earliest biographical particulars. The visitor to Maidstone will find the Unitarian chapel in Bullock Lane, between Earl Street and the High Street, still standing as it was in Hazlitt 's father's time; the dwelling house in Rose Yard adjacent, where Hazlitt was born, has long since disappeared.

If we seek for a reason for the excellent minister's leaving Maidstone when his son William was eighteen months old, we find it in his open advocacy, during a crisis in the war, of the cause of American independence. A move was made back to Ireland, where at Bandon, county Cork, there was a Presbyterian congregation. Hard by, at Kinsale, were the American prisoners, and these the Rev. William Hazlitt befriended. The war

1783] AMERICA

was not yet over, but with the surrender at Yorktown it was drawing to its close. " The feud between Whigs and Tories," notes Margaret Hazlitt, " ran high, and my father, who never disguised his sentiments, gave great offence by his freedom in writing and speaking at a time when the unbridled license of the army (who took liberties in Ireland that they dared not do at home) made it dangerous to offend the haughty officers, who seemed to think wearing a sword entitled them to domineer over their fellow-subjects." America (whither a number of their name had already proceeded) was the land of liberty to this little family. When Hazlitt's father, the excellent Unitarian minister, embarked the whole group of them at Cork, on April 3, 1783, and proceeded with handsome testimonials to seek the friendship and the suffrages of his Majesty's late rebels, the boy was a week short of his fifth birthday and the great republic six months short of its acknowledged independence.

Hazlitt in America, from his sixth to his ninth year, need not very long detain us. The pictures given us by Margaret Hazlitt1 are charming, but they are pictures of scenes and events which Hazlitt himself in after life did not remember. In all his works, built upon personal recollection as they are, the only reference to his stay in America is to the taste of the barberries picked on the hills, where they had lain beneath a winter's snow. The hills were those about Weymouth and Upper Dorchester, at which places, after a short stay in New York and a longer one in Philadelphia, the family successively resided. In Boston the Rev. William Hazlitt founded the first Unitarian church ; and in his numerous journeys about this countryside his

1 In extracts, in the late Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's " Four Generations of a Literary Family " (1897). The narrative in its entirety has not been published.

younger son accompanied him and sat in the pulpit while his father preached. " How often have we stood," writes his sister, " at the window, looking at my father as he went up this road with William in his nankeen dress, marching by his side, like one that could never be tired." The road is that from Dorchester to Boston. But the opportunity for permanent settlement, for which the minister had hoped, did not present itself ; and at the end of three years he returned to England.

The nine months during which the family stayed behind in Dorchester was a period in which, after a late start at learning, the boy Hazlitt " nearly killed himself " (the phrase is his sister's) by excessive application to his Latin grammar. The tuition was that of his brother John, who for his part was already assisting the family by painting the portraits of American citizens. The intensity with which Hazlitt applied himself to this earliest of his studies is the key to the first of our letters.

Hazlitt to his Father

My Dear Papa, — I shall never forget that we came to america. If we had not came to america, we should not have been away from one and other, though now it can not be helped. I think for my part that it would have been a great deal better if the white people had not found it out. Let the others have it to themselves, for it was made for them. I have got a little of my grammar ; sometimes I get three pages and sometimes but one. I do not sifer any at all. Mamma Peggy and Jacky are all very well, and I am to. — I still remain your most affectionate son

William Hazlitt.

No sooner had the Rev. William Hazlitt returned, says his daughter, than two openings occurred in the ministry of the nature for which he had been waiting, and either of which he would have accepted. It is to such a slight chance we owe it that William Hazlitt grew up to be a figure in English letters and not in American — if, indeed, he would in other circumstances have grown up to be a figure in letters at all.

u

The father had obtained a settlement at Wem, in Shropshire, but before the removal of the family thither, after their arrival in August 1787, a few weeks were spent in London, at the then salubrious suburb of Walworth, for the benefit of the mother's health after the voyage. It was in the pleasure gardens there, somewhat curiously, that the boy's conscious memory began, as readers of the essay on Why Distant Objects Please, written thirty-five years afterwards, will remember : "I see the beds of larkspur with purple eyes; tall holly oaks, red and yellow; the broad sunflowers, caked in gold, with bees buzzing round them; wildernesses of pinks, and hot-glowing pionies ; poppies run to seed; the sugared lily, and faint mignionette, all ranged in order, and as thick as they can grow ; the box-tree borders ; the gravel-walks, the painted alcove, the confectionery, the clotted cream : — I think I see them now with sparkling looks ; or have they vanished while I have been writing this description of them ? No matter ; they will return again when I least think of them. All that I have observed since, of flowers and plants, and grass-plots, and of suburb delights, seems, to me, borrowed from ' that first garden of my innocence ' — to be slips and scions stolen from that bed of memory."

The removal to Wem was made towards the end of the year, and John Hazlitt, now aged twenty-one, was left in London to study under Sir Joshua Reynolds, to move in the Godwin circle1, and to live by his gift as a painter of miniatures. We shall best acquaint ourselves with the progress made by his younger brother from the letter which follows.

Hazlitt to his Brother

Wem, Saturday morning. [March 1788]

Dear Brother, — I received your letter this morning. We were all glad to hear that you were well, and that you have so much business to do. We cannot be happy without being employed. I want you to tell me whether you go to the Academy or not, and what pictures you intend for the exhibition. Tell the exhibitioners to finish the exhibition soon, that you may come and see us. You must send your picture to us directly. You want to know what I do. I am a busybody, and do many silly things : I drew eyes and noses till about a fortnight ago. I have drawn a little boy since, a man's face, and a little boy's front face, taken from a bust. Next Monday I shall begin to read Ovid's Metamorphoses and Eutropius. I shall like to know all the Latin and Greek I can. I want to learn how to measure the stars. I shall not, I suppose, paint the worse for knowing everything else. I begun to cypher a fortnight after Christmas, and shall go into the rule of three next week. I can teach a boy of sixteen already who was cyphering eight months before me; is he not a great dunce? I shall go through the whole cyphering book this summer, and then I am to learn Euclid. We go to school at nine every morning. Three boys begin with reading the Bible. Then I and two others show our exercises. We then read the [Enfield's] Speaker. Then we all set about our lessons, and those who are first ready say first. At eleven we write and cypher. In the afternoon we stand for places at spell-

l An association between the Godwin and Loftus families, as Margaret Hazlitt informs us, had been formed at Wisbeach, in the ministry of which place the father of William Godwin was a predecessor of the Rev. William Hazlitt.

1789] CHILDISH TRAITS

ing, and I am almost always first. We also read, and do a great deal of business besides. I can say no more about the boys here : some are so sulky they wont play ; others are quarrelsome because they cannot learn, and are only fit for fighting like stupid dogs and cats. I can jump four yards at a running jump, and two at a standing jump. I intend to try you at this when you come down. We are not all well, for poor Peggy has a great cold . . . Write soon again. I wish I could see all those paintings that you see, and that Peggy had a good prize. I dont want your old clothes. I shall go to dancing this month. This is all I can say. I am your affectionate brother,

William Hazlitt.

The impression we gain from this letter is confirmed for us by Margaret Hazlitt in one of the latest of her notes : " He was at this time the most active, lively, and happiest of boys ; his time, divided between his studies and his childish sports, passed smoothly on. Beloved by all for his amiable temper and manners, pleasing above his years. The delight and pride of his own family." The child, in a word, who looks out from his brother's miniature portrait.

There are other hints for a picture of the boy's life at this period. In the essay already quoted we may go on to read : " If I have pleasure in a flower-garden, I have in a kitchen-garden too, and for the same reason. If I see a row of cabbage-plants or of peas or beans coming up, I immediately think of those which I used so carefully to water of an evening at W [e] m, when my day's tasks were done, and of the pain with which I saw them droop and hang down their leaves in the morning sun. Again, I never see a child's kite in the air, but it seems to pull at my heart. It is to me ' a thing of life.' I feel the twinge at my elbow, the flutter and palpitation with which I used to let go the string of my own, as it rose in the air and towered among the clouds."

Again : " When I was a boy, I lived within sight of a range of lofty hills, whose blue tops blending with the setting sun had often tempted by longing eyes and wandering feet. At last I put my project in execution, and on a nearer approach, instead of glimmering air woven into fantastic shapes, found them huge lumpish heaps of discoloured earth."

In 1789, when Hazlitt was nearly eleven, the Estates General were summoned and the French Revolution began. The Bastille fell, his father's friend Dr. Price preached a celebrated sermon, the Doctor was answered by the even more justly celebrated " Reflections " of Burke. These were great events, certain to re-echo in the quiet of the Shropshire presbytery. Each of them at the time, however, meant less to the boy than his first visit to Liverpool.

This came about in 1790, and was due to the interest shewn in him by a Mrs. Tracy, the wife of a West India merchant. The period of his residence is documented by a group of letters, which we shall draw upon here in the degree in which they seem likely to afford us guidance for the future. The first is to his father. " I now sit down," we read, " to spend a little time in an employment, the productions of which I know will give you pleasure, though I know that every minute that I am employed in doing anything which will be advantageous to me, will give you pleasure. Happy indeed, unspeakably happy, are those people who, when at the point of death, are able to say, with a satisfaction which none but themselves can have any idea of — ' I have done with this world, I shall now have no more of its temptations to struggle with, and praise be to God I have overcome them ; now no more sorrow, now no more grief, but happiness for evermore ! ' " We may here take a few more lines in this dutiful strain

1790] LIVERPOOL

for granted. " After I had sealed up my last letter to you, George asked me if I were glad the Test Act was not repealed. I told him, No. Then he asked me why ? and I told him because I thought that all the people who are the inhabitants of a country, of whatsoever sect or denomination, should have the same rights with others. But, says he, then they would try to get their religion established, or something to that purpose. — Well, what if it should be so ? — He said that the Church religion was an old one. Well, said I, Popery is older than that. — But then, said he, the Church religion is better than Popery. — And the Presbyterian is better than that, said I. I told him I thought so for certain reasons, not because I went to Chapel. But at last, when I had overpowered him with my arguments, he said he wished he understood it as well as I did, for I was too high learned for him. I then went to the concert." The letter contains also strictures upon a certain " unhospitable English prim * lady,' if such she may be called. She asked us, as if she were afraid we would accept it, if we would stay to tea. And at the other English person's, for I am sure she belongs to no other country than to England, I got such a surfeit of their ceremonial unsociality, that I could not help wishing myself in America. I had rather people would tell one to go out of the house than ask one to stay, and, at the same time, be trembling all over, for fear one should take a slice of meat, or a dish of tea, with them. Such as these require an Horace or a Shakespeare to describe them. I have not yet learned the gamut perfectly, but I would have done it if I could. I spent a very agreeable day yesterday, as I read 160 pages of Priestley, and heard two good sermons."

To this letter we are fortunate in possessing the Rev. William Hazlitt's reply : " On Wednesday evening we had your letter, which was finished on the preceding Monday. The piety displayed in the first part of it was a great refreshment to me. Continue to cherish those thoughts which then occupied your mind, continue to be virtuous, and you will finally be that happy being whom you describe, and to this purpose you have nothing more to do than to pursue that conduct, which will always yield you the highest pleasures even in this present life. But he who once gives way to any known vice, in the very instant hazards his total depravity and total ruin. You must, therefore, fixedly resolve never, through any possible motives, to do anything which you believe to be wrong. This will be only resolving never to be miserable, and this I rejoicingly expect will be the unwavering resolution of my William. Your conversation updn the Test Act did you honour. If we only think justly we shall always easily foil all the advocates of tyranny. The inhospitable ladies whom you mention were, perhaps, treated by you with too great severity. We know not how people may be circumstanced at a particular moment, whose disposition is generally friendly. They may then happen to pass under a cloud, which unfits them for social intercourse. We must see them more than once or twice to be able to form a tolerable judgment of their characters. There are but few, like Mrs. Tracy, who can always appear what they really are. I do not say, however, that the English ladies whom you mentioned are not exactly as you described them. I only wish to caution you against forming too hasty a judgment of characters, who can seldom be known at a single interview. I wish you, if you can, to become master of the gamut whilst you are there. I am glad that you have made so great a progress in French." The father's letter goes on to

1790] EVIDENCES OF PIETY

give news of America, and of one Boston friend, a Mr. Booth, in particular. " He says, concerning you, ' I read Billy's letter to Fanny, and she was delighted with it. She sends her love to him ; but Fanny has lost the recollection of her little playfellow. The letter does Billy much credit. He has uncommon powers of mind, and if nothing happens to prevent his receiving a liberal education, he must make a great man.' " This Boston friend, Mr. Booth, deserves remembrance for his early confidence in Hazlitt's powers of mind.

We need not concern ourselves with further evidences of his piety, nor with the continued progress of his education. We may note, however, that he has been to Church, " the first time I ever was in one, and I do

not care if I should never go into one again

The Clergyman, after he had gabbled over half a dozen prayers, began his sermon, the text of which was as follows : Zachariah, 3rd chapter, 2nd verse, latter part — ' Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire ? ' If a person had come in five minutes after he began, he would have thought that he had taken his text out of Joshua. In short, his sermon had neither head nor tail. I was sorry that so much time should be thrown away upon nonsense." He has been, he tells his mother, to dinner at a certain gentleman's. " He is a very rich man, but — The man who is a well-wisher to slavery, is always a slave himself. The King, who wishes to enslave all mankind, is a slave to ambition. The man who wishes to enslave all mankind for his

king, is himself a slave to his king Be sure to

tell me if I may sell my old Buckles." Again : " They were pressing on Saturday evening. The world is not quite perfect yet; nor will it ever be so whilst such practices are reckoned lawful. — P.S. I like my Balls very well, and have also received the money."

At Liverpool he saw his first play, and wrote his first dramatic criticism. " The play was ' Love in Many Masks,' and the farce, ' No Song, No Supper.' It was very entertaining, and was performed by some of the best players in London, as for instance, Kemble, Suett, Dignum, the famous singer, Mrs. Williams, Miss Hagley, Miss Romanzini, and others. Suett, who acted in the character of Ned Blunt, was enough to make any one laugh, though he stood still ; and Kemble acted admirably as an officer. Mr. Dignum sang beautifully, and Miss Hagley acted the country-girl with much exactness."

With his return from Liverpool, the youth of Hazlitt passes behind a curtain — a curtain which is lifted for a moment in the following year for the display of what his son terms his " first literary production." This took the form of a letter to the Shrewsbury Chronicle, in protest against the treatment accorded to Joseph Priestley at the hands of the mob of Birmingham, on the occasion of the second anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille. We need not have that document of the father's William here, but may take instead a small piece of evidence which has not hitherto been reproduced.

We find it, in the British Museum, in some unpublished " Biographical Notices " prepared by the Rev. Joseph Hunter of Bath, who become intimate with the Hazlitt family after their removal from Wem to that city many years later. Having, as he said, " some particular friends here who were members of Mr. Hazlitt 's congregation at Wem," he put down such particulars regarding the youth of the younger and more distinguished son as he gained from the lips of " a lady not at all given to embellishing " :

1792] A CLOUD

He was one of the most entertaining and prepossessing children ever seen ; and so he continued till he was about nine [sic] years old. It happened that a lady from Liverpool came to spend some time at Wem. She was wonderfully taken with this child, and she invited him to spend some little time with her at Liverpool. To Liverpool he went. But he soon found that he was not made so much of there as he had been at Wem. The lady went out visiting, leaving him at home by himself : and, in short, the child of nine years old thought himself slighted : he became sullen : and this sullenness continued ever after, and formed the predominant feature in his character during the remainder of his schoolboy days. He now showed his talent for satire, mimicry, and caricature. By the time he was twelve or thirteen, he would not attend the devotions of the family. He would not go to chapel. He would shut himself up from the rest of the family : be seen by no one during the day : but at night he would ramble forth no one knew where : and in the moonlight nights he used to scamper about the fields, like, as my informant says, any wild thing.

The correction is subsequently added, on the authority of the " Literary Remains," that the visit to Liverpool took place at the age of twelve ; and the account so amended may no doubt be accepted as having a certain limited objective value. Other hints will occur that at about this time the boy (in the phrase of his father for the ladies of Liverpool) " passed under a cloud, which unfitted him for social intercourse."

What the young Hazlitt was doing with his days, of course, was making those first intensive efforts at reading which we may allow him more fully to describe in the next chapter. As to his abstentions from his father's chapel, that these were not complete we may gather from his own evidence. " When I was about fourteen," he says, " (as long ago as the year 1792), in consequence of a dispute, one day after meeting, between my father and an old lady of the congregation, respecting the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts and the limits of religious tolerance, I set about forming in my head (the first time I ever attempted to think) the following system of political rights and general jurisprudence." This was the Project for a New Theory of Civil and Criminal Legislation, which, persevered with at college, and then set aside, was returned to by Hazlitt in the last years of his life. It was, in its earliest form, the rock on which the career his father had planned for him was destined to split ; the " circumstance," as he himself says, " that decided the fate of my future life; or rather, I would say it was from an original bias or craving to be satisfied of the reason of. things, that I seized hold of this accidental opportunity to indulge in its uneasy and unconscious determination."