Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
As a student at the English Department of the Faculty of Arts, Fouad I (now Cairo) University, one of my textbooks was The Best of Hazlitt, a selection of the great critic and essayist's articles. What I enjoyed most were his comments on English poets.
I was reminded of this when the English press drew my intention to an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London entitled William Hazlitt: Spirit of the Age. A collection of portraits of cultural and political figures of the early 19th century on whom Hazlitt had written, the exhibition is named after a book first published in 1825 in Paris. The publisher omitted Hazlitt's name from the title page -- a consequence of the scandal following the publication of Hazlitt's Liber Amoris, "an erotic narrative" describing his love for Sarah Walker, a woman half his age. Going through this masterpiece today, one cannot help thinking of it as a forerunner of Nabokov's Lolita.
In an article in the Independent Review of 12 May, Duncan Wu, a professor of English and fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, explains that this affair "blighted [Hazlitt's] reputation. It could be argued," Wu goes on, "that this was another case of that quintessentially English affliction, hypocrisy... He can't have been the only middle-aged man in the 1820s to fall for a woman half his age."
As critic and essayist Hazlitt is thought to be remarkable for his felicity, even fertility with respect to English literature. Going through what has been written about him, one senses that he had no particular system with which to practise literary criticism. His criticism, roughly speaking, falls into two categories. The first, most apparent in his "Lectures on the English Poets", comprises the effort to be "general", to come up with a theory to explain "what poetry in general is and what it is not", perhaps a reminder of Coleridge's ideas about poetry.
In the second category, Hazlitt handles separate authors, works and pieces, coming up, in the following four books, with what amounts to a survey of English poets and their work: Lectures on the English Poets (1818), The English Comic Writers (1819), Elizabethean Literature (1820) and Characters of Shakespeare. Hazlitt wrote about The Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, The Decameron, Homer, the Bible and Dante. In dealing with these figures, his criticism is said to have been an act of literary faith and hope. It was also, clearly, a new substance in its own right, something to be added to the literary cosmos.
Going back to Wu's article, one cannot help noticing the enthusiasm, the compulsion to give Hazlitt his due. In his analysis of Liber Amoris and the critics' response to it, Wu contends that the book proved "inflammatory" because "the psyche it portrays in such painful and courageous detail is characterically male. Liber Amori is a great book because the weaknesses it documents are elemental to the male of the species. It reveals part of ourselves we would just as soon not face up to."
Wu deplores the fact that Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age is not available in paperback, a fact that makes the popularity this exhibition might give rise to particularly welcome -- a compelling rendition, in oil and watercolour, of those whom Hazlitt portrayed in his book. Wu quotes Hazlitt's comments on some of his subjects. Coleridge, for example, "has flirted with the muses as with a set of mistresses". Walter Scott is "the most popular writer of the age -- for the time being". Wordsworth has become "the God of his own idolatry", while Byron is "the spoilt child of fame as well as fortune". Charles Lamb "is endeared to his friends not less for his foibles than his virtues".
Hazlitt is known and often quoted as saying: "Poetry dwells in a perpetual utopia of its own. It does not create difficulties where they do not exists, but contrives to get rid of them whether they exist or not." And it is in the light of this comment that one should read his criticism.
