Words from William Hazlitt the Romantic
Writer Who Mentored Keats Speaks to Modern Readers
Jun 18, 2008
William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was a journalist, painter, essayist, critic and pamphleteer who lived in the era of William Blake and Samuel Coleridge, and who influenced John Keats.
He was a plain speaker and a plain writer. David Bromwich, in his book Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), observed that: “Hazlitt attempted possibles. He wrote for those who could understand him as he was.”
Hazlitt was also a master of the aphorism or pithy saying, for example: “To be young is to be as one of the Immortal Gods”. (Quoted in Bromwich), and “Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal”. (Hazlitt, The Pleasure of Hating. London: Penguin, 2004).
Political Views
Hazlitt believed in republicanism, democracy and freedom of expression. One of his better-known essays (reproduced in The Pleasure of Hating) illustrates both his democratic passions and his penchant for writing in a dialogue style.
“What is the People?
And who are you that ask the question? One of the people. And yet you would be something! …Millions of men, like you, with hearts beating in their bosoms, with thoughts stirring in their minds…and a desire of happiness, and a right to freedom, and a will to be free.”
About half of Hazlitt’s collected works are journalism. Aside from needing to make a living, he had a moral belief in writing for all readers. According to Bromwich, Hazlitt considered that “writing has its place in a larger cultural conversation where the merits of everything are to be warmly debated, where indeed a thing’s value lies largely in the discussion it provides.
Artistic Criticism
This “inclusionist” approach put Hazlitt at odds with later generations of literary critics. Unlike twentieth-century academics concerned with categories and methods, Hazlitt had a more impressionistic approach, endorsing “sensation” and emotion in an artist’s work. He would seldom come to a firm view about a painting or poem. Bromwich observes that this was a different perspective to that of Samuel Coleridge, and also cites T.S. Eliot, who viewed Hazlitt as “a poor relation of the responsible critic, guilty of ‘crimes against taste’.”
Subsequent critics’ dismissal of Blake calls to mind the debate between a method-based “new critical” and more “textual” ways of analysing literature, with textual criticism rating not only the literary work in itself, but aspects such as the impact the work has on the reader.
Hazlitt was one of few in his own time to appreciate William Blake. He admired Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”, describing them as “too deep for the vulgar”.
A young John Keats was inspired by Hazlitt, describing a comment made by the older man in a lecture as “a whale’s back in a sea of prose”. The creative relationship between Hazlitt and Keats is considered further in a related Suite 101 article, Freeing Artistic Genius.
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