666 Examiner,' in praise of "The Excursion," was read to the seer by Mr Wilson himself. "Ha,' said Mr Wordsworth, somewhat appeased, 'there's some sense in this fellow, too: the Dog writes strong.. Very well written indeed, sir, I did not expect a thing of this kind,' and strutting up and down the room in high good humour there is an inaccuracy here: I am sure Mr Wordsworth never strutted"kept every now and then wondering who could be the author, he had no idea and should like very much to know to whom he was indebted for such pointed and judicious praise.' When Wilson told him that it was Hazlitt's, "our poor philosopher was thrown into a greater rage than ever, and a fit of outrageous inoredulity, to think that he should be indebted for the first favourable account that had ever appeared of any work that he had ever written to a person on whom he had conferred such great and merited obligations." And if the story be true, nobody would ever dispute the justice of Hazlitt's conclusion: "I think this statement will show un III. From general charges Hazlitt's assailant descended to particular accusations. "Do you not call Mr Canning," he demands with shaking forefinger-"one flash of whose eye, one word of whose lip, would wither you into annihilationthe most contemptible character of the day?" Such a that there is little love lost between me and my benefactor." When his cross-examiner goes on to say that Hazlitt has been "deservedly expelled from 'The Edinburgh Review," his retort is apt and ready. "I leave Mr Jeffrey to answer that question, and I also inclose some letters from him to me on the subject of communications for that work, written just before and since the publication of the seventeenth number of 'Blackwood's Magazine.' This imputation alone, which I affirm to be false at the time it was made, but which was meant as a prediction to fulfil itself, strikes at my reputation as an author and my livelihood in the most direct and deliberate way. As to the anxiety of the writer to have me turned out of the E. R. as a disgrace and injury to that work, it is not easy to reconcile this with his denunciation of that publication as a dying work, and his wish to see it dead. It seems that he hates the E. R. much, but he hates me more." Such was one of the charges which Hazlitt regarded as actionable, and plainly the "Old Friend with the New Face" could not have it both ways. question, of course, left Hazlitt unperturbed. He liked nothing better than to ridicule Mr Canning, and would welcome any charge more gladly than the charge that he had applauded the Anti-Jacobin. "I am not aware," said he, "that Mr Canning's fade oratory would wither me into annihila tion any more than the sickly smell of a perfumer's shop would wither me into annihilation; but if I have called him the most contemptible oharacter of the day, I grant I have gone too far. It is indeed a bold word to say." As the dispute continues, the interlocutors, so to say, raise their voices, and shout insults at one another. Hazlitt is denounced for an "impudent charlatan," "a hard-hearted Cockney"; the malignity of ignorance and the drunkenness of folly are imputed to him; he is asked if he knows the Latin for a goose. And he retorts upon his attacker with all the contempt he can muster. "You say," he writes, "that I, who do not know the number of letters in the Greek alphabet, pretend to give an opinion on Mr Porson's literary character. And I say, you lie. I take the common opinion of his classical attainments for granted, but I have said that he was also a man of wit and sense, which I might be a judge of without knowing the letters of the Greek alphabet, which I do know." And again: "You say that I at all times and in all places describe the editors of The Scots Magazine' as ninnies and their works as a mill-stone, and I say that you tell the falsehood to do me an injury." So the fight goes on, until Hazlitt arrives at his peroration, in which he resents, very properly, that the epithet "pimpled" should be applied to him. Happily, by our code of to-day, such personal assaults as this are im VOL. CCIV.-NO. MCCXXXV. possible, and perhaps even Hazlitt, living in a rougher time, would have done better to ignore it. But it rankled, as the insult thrown at his Tishy by Jonathan Wild rankled in that lady's chaste mind, and he cannot but ask in Tishy's own accent, "why pimpled, Mr Blackwood, why pimpled?" "Finally, sir, you call me as a nickname pimpled Hazlitt" thus the article comes to an end. "And I am not pimpled, but remarkably pale and sallow. You were told of this as a false fact, and you repeated it and still repeat it, declaring to hundreds of persons individually and to the public that you not only do not care for the distinction between truth and falsehood, but that you are superior to being thought to care about it. When Mr Patmore simply stated at the end of his account of my Lectures that you were in a mistake in applying the epithet 'pimpled' to me, you replied that I had lately got into a passion with a humble squire who had spied a pimple on my nose'-insinuating with admirable dexterity three falsehoods in one sentence. 1. That it was I who had given the account of my own Lectures. 2. That the person who contradicted your account was in a furious passion. 3. That the humble squire had actually spied a pimple on my nose. "You say, lastly, in another place (you or one of the set) that I have no opinion of my own, but by contradicting all established and generally received opinion. And you bring as a 2 c any man. The author of "A Letter to William Gifford, Esq.," knew well that the flame of invective burned within, and he was not one to hide his light under a bushel. If his politics were all in the future, his criticism was all in the past, and he thought that nobody who did not agree with his platitudes about liberty and reform was capable of a good verse or a good action. Even if his friends were poets he could see little merit in them. Shelley, says he, "has a maggot in his brain, a hectic stutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic." He is "chargeable with extreme levity," and Hazlitt wishes that "he would put a stop to the incessant, alarming whirl of his voltaic battery." And what of Keats? The fault of all living poets. "I cannot say that I ever learnt much about Shakespeare or Milton from these professed guides, for I never heard them say much about them "-thus he writes. "They were always talking of themselves and one another." When some one said that he would like to see Shakespeare, for his part, he wrote, he would give a good deal not to see him; "at least, if he was at all like anybody else that I have ever seen." Though Hazlitt would not permit others unavenged to treat harshly the poets, whom he castigated himself, though he resented, rhetorically, any attack upon himself, he was a man of humour after all, and he must perforce have admitted that in the war of wits both his poems is "effeminacy." sides might claim the right Hazlitt hints that they should of abuse. And he himself be classed with the productions outstripped in violence and of the Della Cruscan school, in injustice all injustice all the men the "calm peaceable writers," of 'Blackwood's' and 'The in Dryden's phrase, whose Quarterly.' In the works of "works should be printed, as no other writer shall you find they generally are, on hot- so large a body of invective. pressed paper, with vignette He spared nobody who was margins." As to Wordsworth in disagreement with him, and and Coleridge, he seemed to few who were in his own camp. think that he had an exclusive His admiration of the Waverley right to laugh at these austere Novels was not far on this side prophets, who had once been idolatry; and yet he insulted his friends, and he could find no Scott with a poisonous venom, worthier compeer for Southey which neither Lockhart nor than Sir Richard Blackmore! Wilson would have used against He can forget that Byron is a any man. Here are a few of lord no more easily than that the shameful things which Sir Walter Scott is "an aristo- Hazlitt wrote, falsely, about orat in principle." In praising the good Sir Walter, of whose their works he forbears not to character he knew nothing: insult them both. The fact is, "Raised by affluence, the reafter the rapture of his first ward of successful industry, meeting with them, he disliked and by the voice of fame above the want of any but the most honourable patronage, he stooped to the unworthy acts of adulation, and abetted the views of the great with the pettifogging feelings of the meanest dependant on office"; and again: "he strewed the slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn over the bud and promise of genius, because it was not fostered in the hotbed of corruption, or warped by the trammels of servility"; and worse still: "he joined a gang of desperadoes to spread calumny, contempt, infamy, wherever they were merited by honesty or talent on a different side-he officiously undertook to decide public questions by private insinuations, to prop the throne by nicknames, and the altar by lies-being (by common consent) the finest, the most humane and accomplished writer of his age, he associated himself with and encouraged the lowest panders of a venal press; deluging and nauseating the public mind with the offal and garbage of Billingsgate abuse and vulgar slang." What is all this nonsense? Is it mere "flyting"? Or did Hazlitt believe a word of it when he wrote it? I do not think that he believed a word of it. is merely a noisy and elaborate method of expressing a Whiggish prejudice. It is a showy vengeance upon that sad word "pimpled." Yet proud as Hazlitt is of his satirical power, his satire misses its effect, because it is sent to the wrong address. And, with a full knowledge (or guilty ignorance) of Hazlitt's excesses It in this kind, the Whigs have ever since held up their hands in pious horror at the exaggerations of Lockhart and Wilson and Maginn! And Hazlitt easily surpassed the shameful shamelessness of the passage which I have quoted. In the very act to praise 'Peveril of the Peak,' he thus describes its author: "A thorough-paced partisan in his own person-intolerant, mercenary, mean; a professed toad-eater, a sturdy hack, a pitiful retailer or suborner of infamous slanders, a literary Jack Ketch, who would greedily sacrifice any one of another way of thinking as a victim to prejudice and power, and yet would do it by other hands rather than appear in in it himself." Yet Hazlitt was intelligent enough to know that such works of genius as the Waverley Novels do not proceed from Jack Ketch. He merely indulged once more his taste for invective, and showed himself a finer artist in this kind of writing than any of his contemporaries. Spiteful as he is against all those with whom he disagreed, Hazlitt reserved the finest of his fury for Mr Blackwood and his staff. Long after they had forgotten to mention him, he refrained not his hand from insult. When he talks of the "filth and slime of the Quarterly Review,'" he cannot help adding, "or its drain, Blackwood's 'Edinburgh Magazine."" Mr Blackwood is represented always as a sycophant," and is warned to "take care how he implicates any really respectable char acter by defending it." And then in a violent crescendo of insult he involves in his literary hatred the whole Scottish nation. Not even James Howell himself shrieked more loudly than did Hazlitt against the Scots. "If they are not withheld by conscience or prudence," says he, "they have no mauvaise honte, no involuntary qualms or tremors, to qualify their effrontery and disregard of principle. Their impudence is extreme, their malice is coldblooded, covert, crawling, deliberate, without the frailty or excuse of passion. They club their vices and their venality together, and by the help of both together are invincible. The choice spirits who have lately figured in a much-talkedof publication, with 'old Syl vanus at their head '— 'Leaning on cypress straddle stout,' in their 'pious orgies' resemble a troop of Yahoos, or a herd of Satyrs was, in truth, a slanging match, and nothing more.1 It began with the letter of "The Old Friend with a New Face"; it was continued by Hazlitt in that lively article, some passages of which see the light for the first time in these pages, and afterwards passim. That Hazlitt kept it it up longer than his adversaries reflects little credit on his humour. A sense of proportion might have suggested that the world was weary of or indifferent to the play of his cudgel. While the fight lasted the blows exchanged were shrewd, and the gravity of the combatants was well simulated. To-day, happily, the manners of controversy are restrained, and personal allusions are rightly out of favour. Nor will the ancient method be revived until there arises among us a band of writers carelessly conscious of a talent for "flyting." Meanwhile, it is satisfactory to remember that Lockhart and Wilson's attacks upon Hazlitt did not lessen the public estimation of his work, any more than Hazlitt's far grosser libels damaged the noble character of Sir Walter Scott. If a writer deserve remembrance, all the hostile criticism in the world shall not strike a blow at his living fame. For it is as true to-day as ever it was, that no man was ever written down except by himself. 'And with horned feet they beat the and Wilson's ground I' that is to say, the floor of Mr Blackwood's shop!" Thus Hazlitt, with his tongue in his cheek, let us hope, indicted a nation. After such ebullitions of anger and malice, no sane man could resent what others said of him, or take his own expressions of fury seriously. The battle between Hazlitt and 'Blackwood's Magazine CHARLES WHIBLEY. 1 Had the battle been of life and death, Mr Blackwood would not have been part publisher of Hazlitt's 'Table-Talk,' nor would the author have permitted Mr Blackwood's intervention. |
