Metaphysical Hazlitt
The rediscovery and restitution of Hazlitt as a leading Romantic author has been among the latest and most significant of developments in present-day Romantic studies. This volume of original essays marks the bicentenary of Hazlitt’s first book An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805). Central to the current reappraisal of Hazlitt is the acknowledgement of his stature as a philosopher and not simply a ‘familiar’ essayist. It is only recently that the philosophical content and influence of his work has begun to be acknowledged. Scholars now recognize, as Hazlitt himself always insisted, that An Essay on the Principles of Human Action was his most important book, containing the essence of a philosophy disseminated throughout his later work. These essays offer a comprehensive statement of the significance and transmission of Hazlitt’s philosophical principles, in his own work and in that of his contemporaries and succeeding writers. This book is an essential contribution to a vital new aspect of Romantic studies and shows Hazlitt to be, as his memorial claims, ‘The first (unanswered) Metaphysician of the age’. Uttara Natarajan is Lecturer in English at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and the author of Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals, and the Metaphysics of Power (1998). Tom Paulin is G.M. Young Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford and the author of The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style (1998). Duncan Wu is Professor of English Language and Literature at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford and the editor of Selected Writings of William Hazlitt (9 vols, 1998).
Routledge Studies in Romanticism
1. Keats’s Boyish Imagination Richard Marggraf Turley 2. Leigh Hunt Life, Poetics, Politics Edited by Nicholas Roe 3. Leigh Hunt and the London Literacy Scene A reception history of his major works, 1805–1828 Michael Eberle-Sinatra 4. Tracing Women’s Romanticism Gender, history and transcendence Kari E. Lokke 5. Metaphysical Hazlitt Bicentenary essays Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu 6. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine Biography, celebrity, politics David Higgins
Metaphysical Hazlitt Bicentenary essays
Edited by Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu
First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2005 Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0–415–33566–3
This book is dedicated to the memory of Stanley Jones (1916–1999)
The Essay on the Principles of Human Action...essentially implied the whole paradox of his character as a realistic romantic idealist, born into the Christian faith and still retaining after that faith had evaporated an indelible dye of unworldliness. It was the work of a man who, whilst conscious of the omnipresence and permanence of self-interest and evil, was seeking (like his ex-pastor friend Godwin) a logic that would justify, in the teeth of all the evidences and all the pressures of reality, his own incorrigible bias towards that ethic of altruism in which he had been nurtured, while at the same time (unlike Godwin) recognizing the necessary existence and inescapable importunity of those evidences and those pressures. Shaped by the debate between self-interest and benevolence which had exercised English philosophy for the whole of the eighteenth century, from Shaftesbury and Butler onwards, his whole life was to be a sequence of variations on this dichotomy, an unceasing dialogue between the ideal and the real, the one and the many, the abstract and the concrete, the self and others, the potential and the actual, optimism and pessimism, the scholar's study and the market-place, a renewal of what someone he once quoted called ‘the old quarrel between speculation and practice’, a dialogue he was constantly trying to resolve by an appeal from imagination to reason, whose inadequacies he would then correct by an appeal from reason back to imagination. In the Essay he elaborates a purely abstract and ‘metaphysical’ theory of human action, in a general statement which deliberately neglects the phenomenological or even the existential experience of the individual alive in a particular time and place. This paradoxical refusal of individuality was a limitation amply to be corrected in his later work. Stanley Jones, Hazlitt: A Life, pp. 18–19.
Contents
Contributors Foreword
ix xiii
T O M PA U L I N
Bibliographical note
xv
DUNCAN WU
Introduction: Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action, 1805–2005
1
U T TA R A N ATA R A J A N
PART I
Foundations 1 Disinterested imagining and impersonal feeling
15 17
D AV I D B R O M W I C H
2 Hazlitt and the idea of identity
30
J A M E S M U LV I H I L L
3 ‘The future in the instant’: Hazlitt’s Essay and Shakespeare
43
P H I L I P D AV I S
4 Hazlitt and the selfishness of passion
56
JOHN WHALE
5 Hazlitt and the ‘kings of speech’
68
PA U L H A M I LT O N
PART II
Influences 6 The road to Nether Stowey DUNCAN WU
81 83
viii Contents 7 One impulse: Hazlitt, Wordsworth and The Principles of Human Action
98
T O M PA U L I N
8 Circle of sympathy: Shelley’s Hazlitt
112
U T TA R A N ATA R A J A N
PART III
Parallels 9 ‘Darkening knowledge’: Hazlitt and Bentham on the limits of empiricism
123 125
TIM MILNES
10 Schelling and Hazlitt on disinterestedness and freedom
137
F R E D E R I C K B U RW I C K
11 ‘A nature towards one another’: Hazlitt and the inherent disinterestedness of moral agency
151
A . C . G R AY L I N G
Notes Bibliography Index
160 175 183
Contributors
David Bromwich is Housum Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic and Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s, and the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke’s writings, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform. Frederick Burwick has been a member of the UCLA faculty since 1965, and has held visiting positions in Germany at Würzburg, Siegen, Göttingen and Bamberg. Author and editor of twenty-one books, his research is dedicated to problems of perception, illusion and delusion in literary representation and theatrical performance. He has been named Distinguished Scholar by both the British Academy (1992) and the Keats–Shelley Association (1998). Philip Davis is a Professor in the School of English, University of Liverpool. His publications include In Mind of Johnson, The Experience of Reading, Malamud’s People, Sudden Shakespeare, and in the new Oxford English Literary History series, The Victorians 1830–1880. He has written on Hazlitt in his Memory and Writing, in Real Voices: On Reading, and in articles elsewhere. A.C. Grayling is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. His column in the Times newspaper introduces philosophical ideas to a wider public. He is the author of An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, Berkeley: The Central Questions, The Refutation of Scepticism, and Past Master volumes on Wittgenstein and Russell. His biography of William Hazlitt, The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt, was published in 2001. Paul Hamilton is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London. He has written widely on Romantic subjects. His Metaromanticism was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003. Tim Milnes is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He was previously British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College, Oxford. He has published journal essays on
x Contributors Coleridge, Hazlitt, Shelley and Charles Lamb, and is the author of Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose, Cambridge University Press, 2003. James Mulvihill is Professor of English at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, where he teaches and researches in the area of English Romanticism. His book, Upstart Talents: Rhetoric and the Career of Reason in English Romantic Discourse, 1790–1820, was published in 2004. Uttara Natarajan is Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. She is the author of Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense and of numerous journal articles on Hazlitt. She is currently preparing The Romantic Poets for Blackwell’s Guides to Criticism series. Tom Paulin is G. M. Young Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. His critical study, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style, was published by Faber in 1998. He is working on a book of essays about Hazlitt and on a study of Hazlitt’s influence on Victorian fiction and non-fictional prose. His most recent collection of poems is The Road to Inver: Translations, Versions, Imitations 1975–2003, Faber, 2004. John Whale is Reader in Romantic Literature at the School of English, University of Leeds. His publications include Thomas De Quincey’s Reluctant Autobiography, Imagination Under Pressure, John Keats (in Palgrave’s Critical Issues series), and, as editor, Beyond Romanticism (with Stephen Copley) and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. He is currently working on the culture of pugilism in the Romantic period. Duncan Wu is Professor of English Language and Literature at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He has edited Selected Writings of William Hazlitt (9 vols, 1998) and The Plain Speaker: Key Essays (1998) (with an introduction by Tom Paulin). He is presently at work on a biography of Hazlitt. N.B. The editors wish to acknowledge Malabika Purkayastha’s invaluable assistance in preparing this volume for publication.
Title page of a copy of the first edition of Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action, bearing the ownership signature of Bryan Waller Procter (‘Barry Cornwall’). (Photograph: Duncan Wu)
Foreword
Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action expresses the founding idea which shapes all of his writing. Everything he wrote about art, politics, and history issues from the principle of natural disinterestedness, which he outlines in the Essay, and from the critique of empiricism, which accompanies his argument. It was recognized at the time as an original work of philosophy, but despite its influence on Keats and Shelley and, I think, Wordsworth, it dropped out of sight, until it was rediscovered recently by philosophers. Hazlitt thought of the idea for the Essay in his mid-teens, when he was a student at Hackney New College, the Unitarian academy where he studied between the ages of 15 and 17. For years he struggled fitfully to get his ideas down on paper, often staring for hours at a blank sheet, unable to formulate a sentence. That period of his life – his late adolescence – is represented in one of his greatest essays, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, where he says that at the age of nineteen he was ‘dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the way-side, crushed, bleeding, lifeless’. What saved him was the advent of Coleridge: ‘the light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun’s rays glittering in the puddles of the road’. Although his soul and his heart, he says, have always remained in bondage, ‘that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge’. The Essay on the Principles of Human Action is closely connected to his friendship with Wordsworth and Coleridge. With hindsight, it is possible to feel that Hazlitt’s quarrel with them damaged his reputation, at least in the latter half of the twentieth century, when his work was seldom taught in schools and universities, and seldom discussed by critics. Wordsworth and Coleridge continue to attract scholars, critics and students, and there is a wide general readership for biographical studies of them. However, in recent years, there has been a distinct upsurge of interest in Hazlitt, a development which began with David Bromwich’s major study, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (1983). This was followed by Stanley Jones’s biography, Hazlitt: A Life – From Winterslow to Frith Street (1989). Since then other studies and editions have followed. There have been two major exhibitions centred on The Spirit of the Age, organized by the National Portrait Gallery and the Wordsworth
xiv Foreword Centre at Dove Cottage. An appeal organized by the Guardian newspaper raised £20,000 to restore Hazlitt’s grave in St Ann’s Church, Soho, and for the last four years the editors of this volume have organized a Hazlitt dayschool at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. A small, but growing number of research students are working on Hazlitt. Unfortunately, Coleridge continues to attract a too-considerable amount of critical attention, and this necessarily has the effect of marginalizing Hazlitt. These essays on Hazlitt’s central philosophical study show how it shapes and structures his critical imagination – it was that imagination which influenced many of the great Victorian writers. If we look at the work of those writers, we can see that Hazlitt’s essays exercised a pervasive influence on their work. Dickens, for example, obsessively uses the term ‘disinterestedness’ throughout his novels, and in a favourite adjective ‘bustling’ he adapts Hazlitt’s seminal critical concept of ‘gusto’. Hazlitt’s early anthology The Eloquence of the British Senate is a pervasive influence on Barnaby Rudge, as is The Spirit of the Age, while the opening chapter of David Copperfield invokes ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’. A major study of Hazlitt’s influence on Dickens, as well as on Thackeray, Gaskell, Stevenson, Ruskin, and Carlyle, and possibly George Eliot, remains to be written. All of these writers are Hazlitt’s children, and the poetry of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney also shows his influence. The essays in this volume mark another, very important stage in the reclaiming of his work. Tom Paulin
Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action A Bibliographical Note1 Duncan Wu
By the time it appeared in print, Hazlitt had been working on his first book-length work, on and off, for much of the previous decade; as Stanley Jones has commented, ‘It came at the start of his career as a writer, and it was fundamental to it’.2 Its antecedents may lie in the ‘essay on the political state of man’, which Hazlitt wrote for his tutor at the Hackney New College, John Corrie, in October 17933 – but in the absence of a text any such connection must remain speculative.4 We can be sure, however, that Hazlitt had begun writing what was to become the Essay on the Principles of Human Action by 23 October 1796 when he told his father he was attempting a ‘delineation of the system’.5 According to Hazlitt’s son W.C. Hazlitt it was complete by the autumn of 1803,6 when Hazlitt resided briefly with his brother John in Great Russell Street. But it took a year for him to find a publisher for his first book – Joseph Johnson, the Unitarian who in earlier decades published Joseph Priestley, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, George Dyer, T.R. Malthus, William Frend, and John Horne Tooke. To have published his first book under such auspices was much to Hazlitt’s credit.7 How did this association come about? Keynes cites Henry Crabb Robinson who in his reminiscences of Hazlitt claimed to know the answer:8 He used frequently to breakfast with me And I rendered him a great service by introducing him to Anthony Robinson who procured him his first job – by inducing Johnson to publish his first work The Eloquence of the British Senate – This he never forgot.9 There are a number of problems with this, the most obvious being that Crabb Robinson was out of the country when Hazlitt’s Essay was in preparation: he was in Germany throughout 1804 and much of the following year, not returning to England until 17 September 1805 (the Essay having been published in July). And even if he had been in London, no third party would have been required to make introductions because Crabb Robinson had known Johnson since visiting him at the King’s Bench Prison with Mary Hays in 1799.10 Indeed, he visited him ‘several times’ during Johnson’s confinement ‘and profited by his advice’.11
xvi A bibliographical note The explanation is that Crabb Robinson, writing five decades after the event and without recourse to his diaries (which he did not begin until 1811), has some of his facts wrong. In fact, he provides an accurate account of how he helped Hazlitt find a publisher for his fifth book, The Eloquence of the British Senate – through Anthony Robinson (no relative) (1762–1827), Unitarian, former Baptist minister, and (by the time Hazlitt met him in 1807) sugar-importer, who introduced Hazlitt to Thomas Ostell, who published Eloquence on 4 July 1807. (Incidentally, Ostell was also an associate of Joseph Johnson, his executor at the time of his death on 11 December 1807. Brought up as a Quaker in Cockermouth, Ostell moved in dissenting circles in London, and thus came to be acquainted with Anthony Robinson.)12 This conclusion is supported by the fact that Crabb Robinson elsewhere repeats his claim to have found Hazlitt a publisher specifically for Eloquence of the British Senate,13 and by a letter from Anthony Robinson to Crabb Robinson of 19 April 1807, which reports that Hazlitt’s ‘Eloquence of the Senate [is] in forwardness’.14 If Robinson’s remarks do not apply to the Essay, the question arises of who did introduce Hazlitt to Joseph Johnson. As Herschel Baker has suggested, it was almost certainly William Godwin.15 Baker cites Godwin’s diary, which records two visits from Hazlitt on his return from the Lake District, 25 and 28 July 1804, followed by a further entry on Tuesday 31 July: ‘Call on Johnson (Hazlit)’.16 It may be inferred that Hazlitt requested Godwin to act as his agent, and that he visited the publisher a few days later in order to press Hazlitt’s case. (Hazlitt would have been aware that Godwin had known Johnson since the early 1790s.)17 On Monday 6 August 1804 Godwin recorded a further visit from Hazlitt, presumably to hear how the meeting with Johnson had gone. The diary entries thus provide good evidence for concluding that Godwin should be credited for having brought Hazlitt and Johnson together. Hazlitt was determined to have Johnson publish his first book because he had been known to him from childhood as the first bookseller to take an interest in the writings of his father, Reverend William Hazlitt (1737–1820). When as early as 1766 Thomas Cadell had published Reverend Hazlitt’s first book, Sermon on Human Mortality, Preached at Marshfield, Glostershire, Johnson retailed it at the bookshop he ran with Benjamin Davenport from 8 Paternoster Row, as its title-page declares. In 1769, by then established in St Paul’s Churchyard on his own, Johnson helped Joseph Priestley found the Theological Repository, to which the Reverend Hazlitt became a regular contributor.18 In subsequent years Hazlitt published four books with Johnson – An Essay on the Justice of God (1773), Human Authority, in Matters of Faith, Repugnant to Christianity (1774), Discourses for the Use of Families (1790), and Sermons for the Use of Families (1808) – and during that time planned at least another two with him which, in the event, did not materialize: A Series of Discourses, illustrative of the evidences of the truth of the Christian Religion, subscriptions for which were
A bibliographical note xvii solicited at the end of Discourses for the Use of Families (1790), and ‘Fifty-two Sermons’ (one, presumably, for each week of the year), advertised in the pages of the Monthly Repository for June 1806.19 Hazlitt the elder published with other firms while in America (1783–7), but after returning to England produced books exclusively for Johnson. In view of that, it is reasonable to suppose that when Godwin spoke to Johnson on Tuesday 31 July 1804, the publisher would not just have recognized Hazlitt’s name, but recalled his father and his numerous publications, and thus reflected on the appropriateness of his introducing the world to the work of the younger Hazlitt. Incidentally, Godwin had also known both Hazlitts for many years. His first known encounter with the son was at the studio of Hazlitt’s brother John in Long Acre in September 1794 when Hazlitt was sixteen years old and Godwin twenty-seven.20 I suspect they had known each other for longer than that, as Godwin’s father had preceded Reverend Hazlitt as pastor of the dissenting meeting-house in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, which Hazlitt’s father took over in 1764. When, therefore, Godwin conversed with Johnson on the prospect of bringing Hazlitt’s Essay to press in July 1804, they could have exchanged reminiscences of the Hazlitt family spanning four decades. Under the circumstances, it would have been difficult for Johnson to decline. He must have met the young author, discussed the manuscript, and perhaps suggested alterations, so that nearly a year after his initial discussion with Godwin, Johnson published An Essay on the Principles of Human Action on 19 July 1805.21 Keynes provides its bibliographical formula, indicating that known copies contain a cancel at D5, pages 41–2. There is no surviving manuscript. That the run was 250 copies suggests that its publisher did not expect it to be in much demand; if so, he was right. It was, after all, a philosophical work by an unknown author, unlikely to attract attention. Sales were sluggish and circulation limited, explaining its comparative rarity today: Keynes lists no copies,22 and only 14 appear on Worldcat.23 As W.C. Hazlitt commented: ‘The sale was slow and small, and I do not believe that the author ever received a penny from it’.24 This suggests that the arrangement reached with Johnson was that Hazlitt would take a share of the profits, of which none were forthcoming. Not only did the Essay launch Hazlitt’s career and establish him in literary London, its publication marked the beginning of an association with Joseph Johnson that outlasted the latter’s death in December 1809. Johnson was to publish the third of Hazlitt’s book-length works, An Abridgment of the Light of Nature Pursued, by Abraham Tucker in February 1807 (its title-page again omitting Hazlitt’s name), on which Hazlitt had been working since at least June 1803 when Coleridge had asked Godwin to help find it a publisher.25 In July 1807 Hazlitt read the proofs of his father’s Sermons for the Use of Families, which Johnson would publish the following year, and offered to paint Johnson’s portrait.26 The association continued after Johnson’s
xviii A bibliographical note demise, for Rowland Hunter, his executor and inheritor of his business in St Paul’s Churchyard, co-published (with the Ollier brothers) Characters of Shakespear’s Plays in July 1817,27 and was offered Hazlitt’s Select British Poets in 1824 (which he declined because of copyright infringement). Given the lack of enthusiasm for it until recent times, the bibliographical fortunes of the Essay are unsurprisingly brief, though not without wrinkle. A second edition appeared in 183628 in a new text edited by Hazlitt’s son, ‘considerably improved from marginal corrections in the Author’s copy’.29 Those ‘corrections’ were not extensive, but they would be interesting to see in manuscript: however, Hazlitt’s marked-up copy of the 1805 edition had disappeared by 1867 when W.C. Hazlitt opined, ‘Where is his Essay on Human Action, enriched, as he left it, with his notes in his own hand?’30 Where indeed? Barbara Rosenbaum lists it among ‘Unlocated or Lost Manuscripts’ in her invaluable listing of known textual sources.31 Perhaps for that reason twentieth-century editors of multi-volume editions of Hazlitt’s collected or selected writings (Waller and Glover, Howe, Wu) have preferred 1805 as copy-text; Howe helpfully annotates significant variants. Facsimiles of both nineteenth-century editions have been published: that of 1805 in 1969 by Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints (Gainesville, Florida) with an introduction by John R. Nabholtz; 1836 in 1990 by Thoemmes Press (Bristol, UK), with an introduction by John Valdimir Price.
Introduction Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action – 1805–2005 Uttara Natarajan
The first (unanswered) Metaphysician of the age.
So Hazlitt is proclaimed on his memorial stone, recently lovingly restored with funds raised from hundreds of admirers and enthusiasts, many of whom will hardly recognize him in that aspect. Yet, as it relates to the early decades of the nineteenth century in England, the claim is no mere hyperbole. The first of a long series of plaudits to Hazlitt inscribed in the memorial, it echoes his own most cherished view of himself: ‘the only pretension, of which I am tenacious’, he declares in The Plain Speaker, ‘is that of being a metaphysician’ (‘On Envy’, xii, 98).1 And Charles Lamb stoutly maintains his pre-eminence on this ground when De Quincey attempts to deny it: ‘I know not,’ he said, ‘where you have been so lucky as to find finer thinkers than Hazlitt; for my part, I know of none such. You live, I think, or have lived, in Grasmere. Well, I was once there. I was at Keswick, and all over that wild country; yet none such could I find there. But, stay, there are the caves in your neighbourhood, as well as the lakes; these we did not visit. No, Mary’, turning to his sister, ‘you know we didn’t visit the caves. So, perhaps, these great men live there. Oh! yes, doubtless, they live in the caves of Westmoreland. But you must allow for us poor Londoners. Hazlitt serves for our purposes. And in this poor, little, inconsiderable place of London, he is one of our very prime thinkers.’ 2 But in fact Hazlitt has himself resembled rather too closely those concealed philosophers, the thinkers in the caves, figured by Lamb. Fully to effect the restitution, then, of which the restored memorial is so potent a symbol, the metaphysical Hazlitt, inevitably obscured by the brilliance of the essayist, the critic, and the political radical, remains to be brought into view more plainly.
Hazlitt’s first essay This volume commemorates the 200-year history of Hazlitt’s first essay, also the first and most formal expression of his ‘metaphysical discovery’,
2
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published in 1805: An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in Favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. To which are added, Some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvétius. We might measure by that title alone, its distance, in stylistic terms, from Hazlitt’s ‘familiar style’, embodied and so canonized in some of the greatest achievements in English prose: Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817), Table-Talk (1821–2), The Spirit of the Age (1825). But to Hazlitt himself, this first essay superseded all of the others. In his Letter to William Gifford (1819), he writes, I have been called ‘a writer of third-rate books.’ For myself, there is no work of mine which I should rate so high, except one, which I dare say you never heard of – An Essay on the Principles of Human Action. (ix, 51) In a Table-Talk essay ‘On Great and Little Things’, he reiterates, ‘The only thing I ever piqued myself upon was the writing the Essay on the Principles of Human Action’ (viii, 237). What, then, is Hazlitt’s achievement in the Essay? Its defining insight is contained in its subtitle, ‘the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind’. In that axiom, Hazlitt challenges the inveterate and long-established way of thinking that founds morality on self-interest. To Hazlitt, believing that we are necessarily and naturally selfish inevitably makes us so; to believe better of ourselves is the first step to acting on that better view. ‘Natural disinterestedness’ does not claim that it is more natural to be unselfish than selfish. It abbreviates, in a single phrase, the argument of the Essay, that self-directed (selfish) and other-directed (unselfish) actions are equally imaginative; if the first kind of action is natural, then so is the second. What is common to both kinds of action is the end that they seek: a benefit or good, whether to oneself or another. It is not a love of self that impels me to act in the first place, but a love of good. Introducing a radical disjunction between the (present) self which acts and the (future) self which enjoys the fruit of that action, the Essay realizes a whole new view of personal identity, and an understanding of human beings as naturally and habitually imaginative. For Hazlitt, the impact of that realization was profound. ‘I owed something to truth’, he declares in the Letter to William Gifford, ‘for she had done something for me. Early in life I had made (what I thought) a metaphysical discovery’ (ix, 51).
Reading Hazlitt’s metaphysics: a survey Contemporary responses As Hazlitt tells it, his discovery ‘fell still-born from the press’ (‘On the Causes of Popular Opinion’, xvii, 312). But a survey of the impact of the Essay, in the two hundred years since its first publication, goes some way to undoing the bleak finality of that epitaph. Certainly in his own lifetime
Introduction
3
Hazlitt had little reason to judge differently. The first public responses were at best equivocal, and at worst hostile. The Annual Review, for instance, expresses a high opinion of the anonymous author’s philosophical ability, but objects to his repetitiveness, and plays down the significance of his discovery. What does a hypothetical capacity for ‘natural disinterestedness’ after all avail, when by the author’s own admission, our usual tendency is selfish?3 Much the same objection, but without the concessions of the Annual, is made by the Anti-Jacobin, which also speculates, with mockseriousness, that the work is intended as a sophisticated burlesque: Under the title of a Philosophical Essay it bears the characteristical marks of a highly-finished burlesque. Perhaps the author, teased and out of patience with the extravagancies of metaphysical writers, has resolved to avenge himself upon that vexatious tribe, by holding up to the world an overcharged picture of their absurdities.4 The Monthly Review confesses blank incomprehension, while the Eclectic warns that the rashly venturesome reader will ‘be plunged suddenly into a “palpable obscure”, without bottom, without light, and must fight his way onward, like the Archfiend through Chaos’.5 In the face of this kind of disparagement, the brief sporadic praise of the Essay must have brought its author small consolation. Such praise includes Coleridge’s notice of the Essay in a footnote to his second Lay Sermon (1817), where, refuting Paley’s grounding of prudence and virtue in self-love, he handsomely acknowledges that ‘The fallacious sophistry of the grounding principle in this whole system has been detected … of late years, with great ability and originality, by Mr. W. Hazlitt’.6 In a similar context, denying that an appeal to self-love can be an incitement to virtue, Thomas Noon Talfourd’s ‘Pulpit Oratory’ in the London Magazine in 1821 refers to ‘the noble subtleties of Mr. Hazlitt’s eloquent and ingenious “Essay on the Principles of Human Action”’.7 Victorian readings From such beginnings, the standing of the Essay gains by slow degrees after Hazlitt’s lifetime. Bulwer-Lytton mentions Hazlitt in the headings of his chapter on ‘Moral Philosophy’ in England and the English (1833), and in the body of the chapter places Hazlitt among the major English moralists, although to do so he has to categorize him clumsily and wrongly as a materialist. The chapter makes the following brief reference to the Essay: ‘Mr. Hazlitt has also left behind him an early work, entitled “An Essay on the Principles of Human Action”; little known, and rarely to be met with, but full of original remarks, and worthy a diligent perusal’.8 A fuller and more discerning account, by Richard Henry Horne, is occasioned in 1835, on the publisher’s announcement of a second edition of the Essay.9 In an article,
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titled ‘Hazlitt’s First Essay’, in the Monthly Repository, Horne describes the Essay as ‘the best analysis of identity’.10 That its first draught was made when the author was eighteen, is, he writes, ‘an instance of early development of the reasoning powers that has few parallels in history’.11 Horne’s awareness, that the Essay is ‘the only work to which the author ever adverts with satisfaction in his subsequent productions’, indicates a general familiarity with Hazlitt’s writings, and he anticipates a large readership for the forthcoming second edition: ‘the admirers of Hazlitt’s writing will be gratified in learning the fact, that numerous applications have already been made to the publisher’.12 He even takes mild exception to Hazlitt’s remark on the inaccessibility of the Essay to women: There are women living, on whom his abstract intellect, his impassioned love of truth, and his uncompromised integrity and patriotism, have produced almost as strong and lasting an effect as his intense sensibility in appreciating all the deepest human feelings, and all the forms and idealism of beauty.13 Horne’s view of the Essay matches Hazlitt’s largest claims: the Essay has that highest kind of ‘abstract truth’ that can have a practical effect on everyday life, but that is necessarily contrary, in the first place, to our habitual unexamined conduct: ‘abstract truth, in its purest forms, is almost always in direct opposition to the assumptions on which the common practice of mankind is founded’.14 Bulwer-Lytton, again, reverts to the Essay in a discussion of Hazlitt in an 1867 article on ‘Charles Lamb and Some of his Companions’ in the Quarterly Review. More insightful here than previously, he endorses the two assertions that Hazlitt himself makes about the Essay, that it is an original ‘metaphysical discovery’ and that it is the basis on which all his other writing develops: To the abstract principle upon which it is grounded Hazlitt remained faithful to the close of his life; that principle pervades the best of his writings, colours many of their lovelier beauties, and throws a redeeming light upon many of their gloomier faults. … Where he says something that has been said before it is in his own way, and ideas which, taken singly, had occurred to other minds, form themselves, when conceived by his, into original combinations.15 In the growing body of Hazlitt scholarship in the twentieth century, one or both of these assertions continue to be substantiated. Influence and originality: the Essay in the twentieth century Elisabeth Schneider’s The Aesthetics of William Hazlitt (1933), the first booklength critical study, insists, as its sub-title announces, on ‘the Philosophical
Introduction
5
Basis of his Criticism’, and in so doing implies the foundational place of the Essay in Hazlitt’s corpus, although Schneider is less directly concerned with the Essay than with Hazlitt’s theory of abstraction, developed elsewhere in his philosophical writings. Subsequently, Hazlitt’s view of the imagination, and its early explication in the Essay, acquire a degree of prominence in certain key discussions of the sympathetic imagination in Romantic writing; ‘key’ in that they participate in the defining constructions of a high Romanticism in the mid-twentieth century. To John Bullitt in 1945, ‘The profuse critical and ethical writing of Hazlitt offers an almost unequalled means of showing the character of this [Romantic] interest and confidence in the imagination’; Bullitt establishes from the Essay a belief in the sympathetic imagination that is ‘at the basis of all Hazlitt’s criticism’.16 Similarly, Walter Jackson Bate’s influential treatments of the sympathetic imagination adduce the Essay to explain a conception of imagination central not only to Hazlitt, but to English Romanticism as a whole.17 In particular, Bullitt and Bate assert the significance of the Essay on another count than its originality and its centrality for Hazlitt, and that is its influence on Keats. That Keats owned a copy of the Essay and was profoundly influenced by its thesis of ‘natural disinterestedness’ was noted as early as 1936, in C.L. Finney’s The Evolution of Keats’s Poetry.18 In Bate’s seminal biography of Keats (1963), that suggestion is amplified into a more extended argument, that Keats’s criterion of ‘negative capability’ can be traced directly to the principle of ‘disinterestedness’ in the Essay. For Keats, Bate writes, Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action had lit up a large zone of possibilities. Its persuasive argument on the possible ‘disinterestedness’ of the mind, and its brilliant treatment of the sympathetic potentialities of the imagination, had especially won him.19 Bate’s claims for the Essay do much to transform what is still only Hazlitt’s ‘first awkward little book’, although with an ‘affinity with his later and more accomplished work’, in a new biography of Hazlitt, published around this time.20 The magnitude granted to the Essay by its impact on Keats, and, with the increasing recognition of Hazlitt’s stature as a critic, by its positioning at the heart of his criticism, grows steadily; its originality is also freshly and repeatedly argued. In an article of 1963, for instance, in the philosophy journal, Ethics, James Noxon estimates highly Hazlitt’s philosophical ability and the originality of the Essay, especially foregrounding Hazlitt’s ‘theory of personal identity’ as the ‘most interesting and original aspect of his entire argument’.21 In the same year, another short discriminating article, by Leonard Trawick in Philological Quarterly, finds ‘genuine innovation’ in the Essay, listing a number of Hazlitt’s philosophical sources to show ‘not that he used them, but that he changed them’.22 Shortly thereafter, W.P. Albrecht’s Hazlitt and the Creative Imagination (1965) glosses the
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Essay at some length, reiterating both that it is originary – ‘The Essay marks the beginning of Hazlitt’s life-long insistence that the mind is creative, even in its simplest operations’ – and original – ‘Hazlitt’s claim to originality is not groundless even though the Essay draws heavily on ideas that were current in the eighteenth century’.23 At the same time, counter-claims should also be registered. Kathleen Coburn’s is an example: The Essay on the Principles of Human Action now reads as rather less a work of ‘originality’ than it did to Coleridge … The argument itself is trite, circular, ill-defined in its terms, wholly on a rationalist level, and without the psychological awarenesses already developing in the nineteenth century.24 Coburn’s dismissal, although offhand, is not altogether without its resonances in the writings of more mainstream Hazlitt scholars. For Roy Park in Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age (1971) the Essay, despite previous assertions to the contrary, is neither original nor indicative of philosophical ability. Its intrinsic merits as a work of philosophy are slight. It is largely derivative, and although it reveals Hazlitt as an acute philosophical critic, it can hardly be said to represent an original and constructive contribution to philosophical thought. It is not to be valued highly, therefore, as a positive investigation of metaphysical truth.25 To Park, the Essay is valuable not on philosophical, but on literary-historical and critical grounds, as an early performance of the ethical theory of a neglected major English critic. Similarly, John Kinnaird, in his William Hazlitt: Critic of Power (1978), like Park making a large claim for Hazlitt’s pre-eminence as a critic, is inclined, on that very ground, to play down his philosophical ability. Thus, although Kinnaird acknowledges some philosophical insight in the Essay – ‘the best, most original and least perishable part of Hazlitt’s theory of “disinterestedness” … [is] his sense of self as always in some mode or degree intersubjective, as existing and acting only in tension with real or imagined otherness’ – he repeatedly calls the Essay a failure, not least, of Hazlitt’s perception of the implications of his own insights: Hazlitt failed to appreciate the full import of this analysis … as so often happens in his speculation, he fails to pursue the implications of his insight: he fails here to see that he has established, not the ‘natural benevolence’ of the will, but simply the ‘disinterestedness’ of imagination. … Butler and Hume were content to argue that self-love and benevolence are consistent and correlative; and Hazlitt’s attempt to go further – to reduce both motives to the same mode of ‘sympathy’ – would seem to have necessarily failed.26
Introduction
7
In fact, it is Hazlitt’s awareness that the disinterestedness of the imagination is not synonymous with the benevolence of the will, or, as he puts it, his belief ‘in the theoretical benevolence, and the practical malignity of man’ (‘Aphorisms on Man’, No. XLVI, xx, 343), that leads to the polarity that figures so largely in the present volume, between the thesis of ‘natural disinterestedness’ in the Essay, and the darker view of humanity in other of Hazlitt’s writings. In Hazlitt: the Mind of a Critic (1983), David Bromwich recognizes what Kinnaird does not, that the disinterestedness of the imagination implies no more than the moral neutrality of our natures, and ‘could lead with equal plausibility to sympathy and self-sympathy’.27 Bromwich’s landmark study gives the Essay its just due, fully comprehending, as does Richard Horne nearly a hundred and fifty years earlier, Hazlitt’s driving impulse in countering the principle of self-interest: ‘Hazlitt is concerned lest a plausible but inadequate principle of action (in theory) so deeply impress the minds of those who give it credence that they come (in practice) to exclude every other’.28 Bromwich reviews the main heads of the argument of the Essay, juxtaposing it with other comparable arguments, so as to establish that ‘The principle of natural disinterestedness was a serious departure from what had preceded it in moral philosophy’.29 Hazlitt and the history of ideas The growing acknowledgements of the originality of the Essay and its importance to Hazlitt tend to stop short, however, of estimating its rightful place in the history of ideas, or of suggesting that – given a wider readership – it might significantly have influenced that history. One exception is a paper of 1977 by Donald M. Hassler in the Wordsworth Circle, which lifts the Essay out of the more localized context of Hazlitt studies into the larger sphere of the history of ideas.30 Hassler argues that the Essay, although little known, is at the forefront of the kind of new theorizing which, countering a necessitarian world-view, eventually makes possible the significant scientific advances of the nineteenth century and up to the present day. In the Essay, Hazlitt ‘saw the future as open rather than mechanically determined’, and When this epistemological and aesthetic argument is expanded to a metaphysics … the world-view that Charles Darwin needed becomes imaginable, a world-view that allows for unpredictable intrusions of new things and allows for an open-ended future.31 More recently and on different grounds, the Essay’s larger importance has again been asserted in a philosophical rather than a literary–historical context. In a paper of 1995, titled ‘Hazlitt on the Future of the Self’, in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Raymond Martin and John Barresi make the most serious and considerable case that has so far been made for Hazlitt’s stature and achievement as a philosopher. To Martin and Barresi, Hazlitt is a ‘personal identity theorist’ far ahead of his time:
8
Uttara Natarajan had Hazlitt’s views received the attention they deserved, the philosophical discussion of personal identity may well have leaped ahead one hundred and fifty years and the psychological discussion have been significantly advanced.32
Especially groundbreaking are Hazlitt’s invention and use in the Essay – to test the relation between self-interest and the preservation of identity – of what are now called ‘fission examples’: the hypothetical splitting of a unitary consciousness so as to theorize on the relation of the pre-split consciousness to the post-split entities. In a far-reaching passage in the Essay, Hazlitt supposes a dispersal of consciousness, and so raises the questions: If I imagine myself divided in the future into a number of multiple selves, then in which – and how – is my identity located? And how – and to which – of those selves does my self-concern refer? Martin and Barresi point out that, in direct anticipation of what would not occur to other philosophers until the 1960s, Hazlitt concluded that because of the possibility of fission neither identity nor self-concern necessarily tracks psychological continuity.33 Citing recent psychological research, they show that contemporary studies bear out Hazlitt’s account of childhood development and ‘the importance of the imagination in the development of moral sensibility’.34 Less wide-ranging in its claims for the Essay than Martin and Barresi’s work, my book, Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense (1998) returns to the Essay, and to the theory of imagination it outlines, as the philosophical ground of the whole corpus of Hazlitt’s work. I summarize that philosophy simply as a subordination of the senses to the mind, identifying in that subordination, Hazlitt’s ‘power principle’, a notion of the innate ‘power’ of the mind, that can be traced in turn in each of the major areas of his thought and writing: his theories of discourse, form, genius, and morals, and his practice as a familiar and political essayist. I dwell at some length on the resemblance of Hazlitt’s philosophy to Kant’s, both to establish the scope of Hazlitt’s thinking, and to reposition him within the mainstream of an idealizing Romanticism. Up to the present, the Essay has continued to gain in standing as a canonical Romantic text. It figures prominently in Deborah Elise White’s Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History (2000), which polemically defends the Romantic imagination against the strictures of a narrowly ideological reading, by arguing the continuing relevance of key Romantic accounts of the imagination to current debates about literature and history. White is justly concerned to show that the Essay ‘stages its typically Romantic “defense” of disinterest in both exemplary and original fashion’, and therefore, that ‘it belongs with the canonical Romantic statements on imagination’.35 Focusing on the theorizing of the imagination as it relates to
Introduction
9
questions of individual and national identity, she reads the Essay in conjunction with Hazlitt’s Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, and highlights his footnote on the French and English characters (quoted in full by Tom Paulin in the present volume). White’s sophisticated rehearsal of the Essay’s argument ranges to Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas et al., and she recognizes in the Essay the ‘double gesture’ that has figured in a number of preceding discussions: ‘It at once accounts for acts of a disinterested imagination and for the interested and imaginary misrecognitions that take effect in their wake’.36 Like White making Hazlitt’s philosophy integral to a re-examination of a larger ‘Romanticism’, Tim Milnes is an important recent commentator, incorporating the Essay into his study of Hazlitt’s negotiation of empiricism and idealism: ‘Hazlitt remained epistemologically empiricist while appearing to be metaphysically idealist’.37
New directions A sizeable body of scholarship, then, has prepared the ground for the present volume, which takes the bicentenary of the Essay as the occasion to advance the understanding of its importance on the three fronts indicated so far: its centrality to Hazlitt, its influence on his contemporaries, and as an original intervention in the history of ideas, with identifiable parallels to the arguments of more established philosophers. The three sections in the volume are constituted accordingly. At the head of the first section – and the beginning of the volume – David Bromwich’s chapter retraces and unpacks the argument of the Essay, so as to bring out its two most significant emphases: first, that personal identity is discontinuous and second, that we have an instinctive attraction to what is good. By means of these emphases, the Essay carries out a radical questioning of identity. In countering the utilitarian thesis of self-interest as the basis for action, Hazlitt establishes that there is no single or continuous ‘self’ with reference to which ‘self-interest’ can be determined. My future self is imaginary and in that sense, impersonal; thus, when I act with reference to that self, I am still acting without respect of person, disinterestedly. Furthermore, in so acting, my instinctive compulsion is not ‘self’ but ‘good’. A regard for ‘self’ alone cannot account for my choosing good over evil. I seek what is good for myself because I prize the good; if I prized myself only, good and evil would be equally indifferent to me. In the last part of his discussion, Bromwich identifies this ‘good’ in the Essay on the Principles of Human Action with ‘liberty’ in Hazlitt’s political essays. Hazlitt’s concern with the question of identity is further developed by James Mulvilhill, who locates, in Hazlitt’s concept of identity, the continuity between the Essay and Hazlitt’s later journalistic writing. Identity, as it is described in the Essay, is manifold, composed of successive and everchanging moments of consciousness, and at the same time, realized by imagination as a coherent whole. Such a notion of individual identity extends also to Hazlitt’s account of the character or ‘spirit’ of the age, as a
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characteristic whole that includes but is more than the individuals who constitute it. Similarly, in his reflections on art, on theatre, and on the printed text itself, Hazlitt reiterates the idea of a total effect that is both a compound of, yet distinct from, cumulative individual elements, and in so doing, reinforces and extends the view of identity first set out in the Essay. Where Mulvihill suggests the basis in the Essay of a range of Hazlitt’s writings, Philip Davis focuses specifically on the presence of the Essay in Hazlitt’s Shakespeare criticism. ‘For in Shakespeare Hazlitt finds the human races most highly developed form of instantaneous disinterestedness in creative motion’. Beginning with an instance from King Lear, which he takes to exemplify Hazlitt’s daring assertion in the Essay that even self-love is a kind of imaginative functioning, Davis shows that the Essay is central to Hazlitt’s later understanding of Shakespeare. In the Essay, the thesis of selfinterest, imposed upon human nature by Hobbes and his followers, is a kind of inadequate paraphrase, a secondary or retrospective explanation already defeated by the prior, instantly creative, activity of the imagination. In Shakespearean drama, we witness that primal activity – ‘fast transience’ or perpetual becoming – of the imagination, every instant creating, as the Essay describes it, a future just ahead of itself. Within the dramatic circle, the reaction to each such action is equally immediate and instantaneous, so that Shakespeare’s plays come into being each time anew, refusing the stasis of closure or finished-ness. By matching Hazlitt’s account of Shakespeare to his view of imagination in the Essay, we recognize in the Essay Hazlitt’s version of what the Romantics called ‘Shakespearean thinking’: an understanding of action as not first of all routine, but creative. If in a literature – Shakespeare’s – Hazlitt finds the fulfilment of the imaginative potential for disinterestedness, he grapples constantly with its defeat in reality. Sexual love, John Whale argues, represents to Hazlitt a powerful and persistent threat of such defeat. In the Essay, Hazlitt is careful specifically to exonerate sexual passion from self-interest, both by absorbing it into the larger impulses of sympathy and mutuality, and by linking it to other passions, whose gratification tends to the detriment rather than the welfare of the self, and which therefore cannot be characterized as utilitarian or self-interested. In Hazlitt’s later writing, this second self-destructive aspect of sexual desire challenges and overcomes the first. Thus, although, in his Reply to Malthus’s Essay on Population (1807), Hazlitt counters Malthus’s reductive view of a humanity at the mercy of sexual appetite, towards the close of the Reply, he hints at the ‘disadvantage’ he himself has suffered under a more ‘aerial’ notion of love than Malthus’s. The dual aspect (‘sympathy’ and ‘passion’) of sexual love in the Essay, emerges here as a schism, between romantic idealization and the reality of sexual frustration, a schism developed in Liber Amoris and in Hazlitt’s scathing attacks elsewhere on the disabling effect of an idealizing literary culture. In other respects too, the idealizations of the Essay are brought up against the real world and age that are Hazlitt’s familiar subjects. By Paul
Introduction
11
Hamilton’s showing, the linking together in the Essay of our sense of ourselves and our sense of others as alike imaginative, establishes a connection between individual and social imaginings integral to Hazlitt’s Jacobin outlook. Public authority must derive from and be ratified by individual fulfilment; monarchic privilege is dissolved in the assertion of a shared competence: ‘all men who have the use of speech are kings’. The conflation or continuity of public and private is at the heart of Hazlitt’s view – and of his own exemplary practice of quotation – of cultural action as an enriching of individual perception by its participation in, and renovation of, a shared cultural universe. But although in the Essay Hazlitt ‘proves’ the continuity of the individual and the social, much of his writing is devoted to the exposure or indictment of its rupture. That rupture, indeed, is what characterizes to him the spirit of his age. In an unpoetical age, modern poetry falls into egotism, driven by a conviction that any common language is morally exhausted. Wordsworth’s Jacobinical poetry – his ‘levelling Muse’ – is severed, by its singularity, from a larger cultural universe and so denies its reader access to that universe. Paradoxically, the enfranchising logic of Jacobinism requires a non-Jacobinical poetry, a poetry that offers to its reader a chance to be a ‘king’ of speech. To Hamilton, Hazlitt’s reading of Wordsworth is complex and illuminating, but Hazlitt is too readily dismissive of Shelley, failing to recognize in Shelley, a creative practice, ‘with a sharp eye to the ideological implications’, very much in accordance with his own. Hamilton’s analysis of Hazlitt’s responses to Wordsworth and Shelley sets up the second section of the volume, which focuses on Hazlitt’s relation to these two among his contemporaries. Although Hazlitt’s influence on Keats has already been studied in detail, his bearing on other of the canonical romantic poets has hardly received the same attention. Adducing a range of hitherto unconsidered biographical and textual evidence, Duncan Wu reconstructs Hazlitt’s fateful meeting with Coleridge and Wordsworth in 1798, supplying and speculating on the vital details that ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, Hazlitt’s canonical account of that meeting, might have omitted or elided. Wu traces the interchange and antagonism of the two incipient philosophies in process at that time, and that must have figured largely in the conversations at Nether Stowey: the philosophical system of ‘The Recluse’, on which Wordsworth and Coleridge were engaged, and Hazlitt’s own metaphysical discovery, which was to be published in 1805 as An Essay on the Principles of Human Action. He construes the threat posed by Hazlitt’s thinking – with its emphasis on the innate power of the individual and the freedom of the will – to the associationist and necessitarian schema of The Recluse, arguing that Hazlitt would have challenged both Coleridge’s view of a superintending deity, and Wordsworth’s substitution of nature for that deity. Where Wu draws out the antagonism of Wordsworth’s and Hazlitt’s philosophies, Tom Paulin highlights their compatibility. Eliciting the echoes, back and forth between Hazlitt’s writing and Wordsworth’s, of
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defining images and words, Paulin shows the mutually enriching relationship of Hazlitt’s Essay and Wordsworth’s Prelude; more briefly, he also indicates where De Quincey borrowed from Hazlitt. Paulin begins with Hazlitt’s long footnote in the Essay on the French character, as an expression of philosophical idealism, and in particular, of epistemological process, both of which are embodied by Hazlitt in particular words and phrases, in which they are also so embodied by Wordsworth. Hazlitt’s reading of Wordsworth’s Two-Part Prelude, and Wordsworth’s exposure to the incipient Essay in his early acquaintance and conversation with Hazlitt, thus have a formative impact on the evolution of both texts into their later more finished versions. Turning from Wordsworth to Shelley, in the third essay in this section, I argue the impact of the Essay on Shelley’s moral philosophy. Shelley’s response to the Essay can be tracked through his ‘Speculations on Morals’ into the Defence of Poetry. Without minimizing the importance, to Shelley’s view of the moral imagination, of his reading of Hume and Adam Smith, I contend that the Essay contains a larger view of the imagination that resonates more closely with Shelley’s than either Hume’s or Smith’s. From here, the volume shifts to consider Hazlitt’s philosophy in relation to the more mainstream philosophies of his time and subsequently. The positing in the Essay of an imaginative, formative activity of the mind is directly relevant to Hazlitt’s view of language as the product of that formative or abstracting power. Like Hamilton, exploring the relation between a linguistic practice and a model of language, Tim Milnes takes Hazlitt’s criticism of Bentham’s style as the starting-point of a comparison and reassessment of Hazlitt’s and Bentham’s theories of language. Both thinkers, engaging with the linguist and grammarian John Horne Tooke, develop a model of language that denies referentiality, the one-to-one correspondence with an objective or absolute reality. Language refers not to reality, but perception; it is the expression of the sense-making activity of the mind. But although Hazlitt denies referentiality for language, he nonetheless remains committed to the notion of an absolute or ‘given’ reality, which permits and makes meaningful, epistemological questions. Bentham’s method of paraphrasis, on the other hand, simply translates one perceptual lexicon (of abstract propositions) into another (of pleasure and pain), remaining unconcerned with any foundation or reality independent of perception. Milnes argues that the commitment to an objective or empirical reality reveals in Hazlitt a greater affinity with the empiricists than might at first appear, and invites referentiality in again through the back door. On the other hand, it is the utilitarian philosopher who is the more thoroughgoing in his refusal of the empiricist’s concern with ontological grounds. To Frederick Burwick, the thesis of the Essay that the idea of self is a mental (imaginative) construct links Hazlitt to both Kant and Schelling, for whom the concept of self is grounded in apperception; loosely, the mind’s
Introduction
13
perception of its own process. But Kant’s view of the perceiving self as purely phenomenal is qualified or challenged in Schelling’s counter-view, informed by his knowledge of contemporary science, that ‘material nature and the mind that knows it’ are different aspects of ‘the same “absolute identity” in which both are grounded’. Schelling’s interest in contemporary brain science suggests a closer link to Hazlitt, who, Burwick argues, is led, via his engagement with Hartley, to the impossibility of dissociating mind and brain; thus, in his conclusions on the processes of memory, Hazlitt, like Schelling, adheres to the science of the brain. Furthermore, the relation of mind and nature, on the basis of which Schelling eschews the mind–brain dualism, is inextricably involved in the paradox of freedom and necessity, and it is within the same ideological context as Hazlitt that Schelling develops his notion of freedom as ‘inner necessity’. In the final chapter of the volume, A.C. Grayling articulates and tackles head-on an aspect of Hazlitt’s thought that has emerged throughout the preceding discussions: the apparent discrepancy between Hazlitt’s thesis of ‘natural disinterestedness’ in the Essay, and the pessimistic view, in many of his writings, and especially the great moral essays of The Plain Speaker, of the opposite tendency – egotism – in the human race. Grayling suggests that the discrepancy might be eliminated by a modification or extension of two of Hazlitt’s set positions. First, Hazlitt’s over-riding emphasis on ‘nature’ might be mitigated by allowing a greater influence to ‘nurture’ in the formation of character; second, his own recognition that human nature is a ‘mingled yarn’ might be developed so as to allow both disinterestedness and self-interest as equally natural (and even consistent) sources of motivation. Grayling establishes Hazlitt’s accomplishment in the Essay by eliciting the resemblance of its argument to Strawson’s refutation of scepticism regarding other minds: like Strawson, Hazlitt shows that our awareness of others is the condition of our awareness of ourselves.
Metaphysical Hazlitt is not the first, and will not be the last, to belie the pessimism of Hazlitt’s view that the Essay ‘fell still-born from the press’. It is only the latest to vindicate, in this bicentenary year, Hazlitt’s earlier and happier attitude, the larger hope and sense of achievement, that he wrote into his favourite work: There are moments in the life of a solitary thinker which are to him what the evening of some great victory is to the conqueror and hero – milder triumphs long remembered with truer and deeper delight. And though the shouts of the multitudes do not hail his success, though gay trophies, though the sounds of music, the glittering of armour, and the neighing of steeds do not mingle with his joy, yet shall he not want
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Uttara Natarajan monuments and witnesses of his glory, the deep forest, the willowy brook, the gathering clouds of winter, or the silent gloom of his own chamber, ‘faithful remembrancers of his high endeavour, and his glad success,’ that, as time passes by him with unreturning wing, still awaken the consciousness of a spirit patient, indefatigable in the search of truth, and a hope of surviving in the thoughts and minds of other men. (i, 46)
Part I
Foundations
1
Disinterested Imagining and Impersonal Feeling David Bromwich
The utilitarian reduction of moral philosophy which divided all motives into the self-regarding and the other-regarding was put forward and elaborated in the writings of Mandeville, Hume, and Adam Smith. Reservations, it is true, about these principles of action may be found even among the writers who first propounded them. Hume said that the two sorts of motive permeate each other, and Smith believed that an impartial umpire, ‘the man in the breast’, could persuade the selfish and unselfish parts to agree on a proper tradeoff. But Hazlitt saw all this line of rational speculation as a mistake; in his view of human action, he was closer to Joseph Butler than to any of the commercial and secular writers. It was Butler who had shown unforgettably, in his Preface to the Sermons and in the two sermons ‘Upon the Love of our Neighbour’, that the selfish instincts contradict each other quite as much as any of them contradicts the unselfish. And yet the idea of passionate sympathy was not native to Butler. It was to Hazlitt. The sense that our thoughts of the future are steeped in feelings about more than a single self, and that we act toward others free of a conscious division between self-regarding and other-regarding motives, seems the fairest detail to point to in bringing out the originality of Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action. Idealism may be the tendency most appropriate to connect with the book; but Hazlitt was not an idealist of any common description.1 Neither the theory that experience descends from ideas, characteristic of Platonic idealism, nor the thoroughgoing separation of personal inclinations from moral duties, which one finds in Kant, seems to have had a marked influence on his thinking. Yet one may find a germ of Platonism, and with it something akin to the Kantian hope of progress toward general benevolence, in the way Hazlitt’s argument for the disinterested imagination portrays the human mind looking into the future without regard to persons. This picture is augmented in the Essay by a secondary argument of a more psychological sort: we have, he thinks, an instinctive attraction to the good, wherever it is to be found. The latter emphasis is easy to miss; and when one catches it, one can suppose Hazlitt to be merely wishful. I made this mistake in interpreting the Essay twenty years ago, and I write now partly to correct the emphasis.2
18 David Bromwich If philosophical idealism offers a clue, it seems right also to connect Hazlitt’s argument on imagination with an emerging Romantic hope for personal emancipation. This feeling is present in the early Wordsworth, and in much of the prose of Shelley – a writer not normally associated with Hazlitt, but I suspect that Shelley read the Essay with tremendous interest. The imagination that Hazlitt describes, like ‘the great secret of morals’ that Shelley calls ‘love’, is experienced as ‘a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own’.3 Shelley’s formulation, as much as Hazlitt’s, allows the feeling of identification to be impersonal – ‘person’ being only one of the possible entities with which we may identify ourselves. The Essay puts forward a single main thesis about the nature of action. It includes, however, distinct arguments on the limits of identity and the freedom of imagination. The idea of personal identity that continues from past to future is first shown to be an artifice – the past, says Hazlitt, is known through memory, the present through consciousness. We are then asked to realise that we contemplate the future only with the help of imagination. It follows that someone else’s future is potentially as real to me as my own. Since imagination is not limited by identity, and identity itself is discontinuous, the two arguments can be shown to assist each other. In order to act assuredly in my own interest, I would have to be certain that I continue the same person from past to future. But this I cannot know. And given the future-regarding nature of the imagination, I cannot know what person I am acting for when I look from present to future. There is an auxiliary intuition that has for Hazlitt almost the force of an additional argument. When I act without regard to myself, thinking only what ought to be done, I prefer the good to the bad, the right to the wrong, the generous to the selfish. The sources of this power of action are as inscrutable as the motives Wordsworth spoke of when describing a young man’s love of freedom in ‘Tintern Abbey’: ‘An appetite; a feeling and a love, / That had no need of a remoter charm’.4 This intuition, so close to the force of sensation, is an undercurrent of Hazlitt’s argument which his discursive idiom tends to conceal. If one looks at the principles of action from the other end of Hazlitt’s career – bearing in mind his essay on Coriolanus and the love of power, and his declaration that he believed in the theoretical benevolence and the practical malignity of mankind – an instinctive love of freedom will hardly seem the predominant note in his analysis. The psychology implied by his later writings on Shakespeare and politics comes closer to Burke: we are said to gravitate to the fascinating, as opposed to the dull; to the grand, as opposed to the small; to the powerful, as opposed to the incapable. When, in those writings, Hazlitt does speak of an intuition of the good, he seems to suppose at its foundation an experience of happiness that few lives may contain. But these complications lie outside the text of the Essay, and their effect is to qualify rather than refute its findings.
Disinterested imagining and impersonal feeling 19 Hazlitt confronted a problem at the outset. His discovery was so simple, but it went against habits of thought so ingrained, that, reason-by-reason, argument seemed almost beside the point. How our thinking about human action could have gone so badly astray is a separate question that Hazlitt barely touches upon. Rather, he is in the position of having to state and restate his perception. This fact explains the curious density of the prose in the Essay: a hard book to read (as I have found again). From sentence to sentence, the propositions are unexceptionably clear, yet one feels that one is travelling slowly on difficult terrain. My commentary here is mostly intended to integrate the argument with the pauses it needs. Hazlitt surrounds his subject with examples and counter-examples, and reverses the usual order of polemic, and puts his ‘literature review’ into an appendix. This last was an ill-judged tactic, but he must have felt that what he had to say was more vivid and arresting than any reflection provoked by those earlier authors. ‘I had made (what I thought) a metaphysical discovery’ (ix, 51). It still does seem a discovery. The imagination, by means of which alone I can anticipate future objects, or be interested in them, must carry me out of myself into the feelings of others by one and the same process by which I am thrown forward as it were into my future being, and interested in it. I could not love myself, if I were not capable of loving others. (i, 1–2) Such is the leading argument announced in the title. The world of objects that I may possibly love, and on behalf of which therefore I may suppose myself to act, exhibits the sweep of a circle encompassing all, including me. This means something sharply distinct from a choice of objects that starts from a point of desire in myself and radiates out to touch a few others, or some, or all: the picture of human action drawn by the theorists of selfinterest and the psychologists of association. The only point, according to Hazlitt, at which I truly appear to myself distinct, is the point of pain considered as a sensation. I must feel pain as a sensation; and it is only I who feel it in myself. Yet it is not the case that I must feel an interest in the idea of my own pleasure and pain. The disparity between sensation and idea underlies a distinction Hazlitt will draw between things known by immediate experience and by imagination. The idea of the self alone does not possess the power to convert a distant to an immediate interest. We care for our own future, and need to care more wisely than we can easily do: on this demand the maxims of prudence are founded. We need reminders and precepts embodying a guide to action in order to make the duties of self-care vivid enough to act upon. Hazlitt does not mean to deny this. He only denies that human character is, in essence, organized around empirical prudence. It is widely believed that people have a special interest in things that have happened or could happen to themselves, an interest
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they cannot have regarding things that have happened to others. Hazlitt thinks this belief is due to a fallacy about the principles of action: ‘since I cannot possibly feel the pleasures, or pains which another feels without first becoming that other … our interests must be as necessarily distinct as we ourselves are’ (i, 2). The truth is that feelings condition all our interests. Or, to put it another way, feeling is the precondition of interest. It is plain I cannot have the same feeling for the future that I have for the past. So I cannot have the same interest in the future. By extension, I can hardly feel the same self-interest in connection with the future that I feel in connection with the past. Hazlitt speaks in a provocative, but not quite a clear formulation, of what he calls ‘a sort of game at hide-and-seek between the reasons and motives to virtue’ (i, 6). He may mean that anything we once credit as a reason we shall then be inclined to go back and read into our conduct as a motive – prudent, mature, conciliatory self-interest, for example. He may also be speaking of the game of unmasking at which writers like Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld excelled, the game in which we discover bad or selfish motives for actions that successfully cover themselves with high-minded reasons. Thus: I promoted your fortunes by connecting you with a certain patron because I selflessly wished for your success. This may have been the case. But surely (a writer trained in this school will add) I also wished to put you in my debt and your very abilities made my sensibility of your debt more valuable to me. Notice that the Hobbesian motive is softened by a Humean gloss. Yet the fully domesticated piece of Humean conduct remains susceptible of Hobbesian disenchantment. So much for the game of hide-and-seek. But Hazlitt aims throughout the Essay to address the way our motives in turn may be influenced by our reasons. An unselfish reason may, by our conscious ratification and approval, become all the more effectual a motive for virtuous acts. His argument needs to show negatively that a future that I suppose laid up especially for me can exert no force upon my actions. There is no ‘positive communication between a man’s future, and present self’ (i, 7). For all voluntary action relates to the future, and the future excites no interest except through imagination, which is a faculty I neither own nor can confine. There would, of course, be just such a direct contact between my present and my future state if Locke were right that we act to bring about pleasure, and if pleasure itself were, as Locke supposed it was, the effect of acting to remove some pressing uneasiness. But ‘actual pleasure, and pain’, says Hazlitt, ‘are not the objects of voluntary action’ (i, 8). So, to say that we act in order to obtain pleasure is false. Rather we imagine a result, and imagine the pain or pleasure that will accompany it, and this idea informs our judgement of the desirability of the result. To maximize pleasure and to minimize pain are intentions that do not exert, as it were, a gravitational pull on action. Still, the fact that future objects do not ‘exercise a real power over the imagination’, as if from somewhere outside the imagination, should not be
Disinterested imagining and impersonal feeling 21 taken to suggest that there is no connection between imagination and interest (i, 9). It is precisely by means of imagination that we ‘foresee the probable or necessary consequences of things, and are interested in them’ (i, 9). What you can imagine with sufficient force, you will thereby feel an interest in. To sum up this part of Hazlitt’s discovery: I do not have an identical interest in my future and my present sensations merely because I remain the same person. However close my present to my future self, there is ‘an insurmountable barrier fixed between the present, and the future’, and no ‘intercommunity of thoughts and feelings’ between them (i, 11). One cannot be sure to what extent this is offered as a physicalist theory, flush with the world of sensations, and to what extent it means to carry a psychological and existential resonance. But I find the latter inescapable in view of one extraordinary sentence: ‘The interests of the being who acts, and of the being who suffers are never one’ (i, 11). Hazlitt means conventionally that the two beings have not the same interests when the actor and the sufferer are two separate persons. But he also must mean, very searchingly, that the being who acts and the being who suffers are never one and the same even when they are the same person at two different times. A person suffering the unforeseen aftermath of a voluntary action is not the same being as the person who committed the action. When he wrote the Essay, Hazlitt would already have seen, in a draft of Wordsworth’s play The Borderers, the lines he quoted from memory some years later, about the vast gulf fixed between a being who acts a deed of violence and the being who suffers the knowledge that he has done it. Action is transitory – a step, a blow, The motion of a muscle – this way or that – ’Tis done, and in the after vacancy We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed: Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And shares the nature of infinity.5 This truth of conduct must trouble the complacency with which we defend the idea of a continuous identity. It suggests that all action leads to results we cannot anticipate, with unsearchable consequences for personal identity. So the confidence with which we judge the connection, in someone else’s life, between a conscious act and its consequence proves to be misguided. We do not know how to profit by such judgements in our own lives. An intricately selfish design, mediated with forethought and respect for probability, may backfire. Paradoxically, that is a reason why we are well advised to act for the good, even if we cannot say whose good. This radical questioning of identity, which gives greater reality to a good in a future than to my own benefit in my own future, leads on to the central passage of the Essay:
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David Bromwich If it should be asked then what difference it can make to me whether I pursue my own welfare, or entirely neglect it, what reason I can have to be at all interested in it, I answer that according to the selfish hypothesis I do not see any. But if we admit that there is something in the very idea of good, or evil, which naturally excites desire or aversion, which is in itself the proper motive of action, which impels the mind to pursue the one and to avoid the other by a true moral necessity, then it cannot be indifferent to me whether I believe that any being will be made happy or miserable in consequence of my actions, whether this be myself or another. (i, 11–12, my italics)
Here the impulse toward the good and the aversion from evil are plainly not a matter of physical reactions or tropisms. Inversion of Hobbes’s principle of selfish action is no longer the aim, if it ever was. Rather, according to Hazlitt, ‘there is something in the very idea of good, or evil’ – the mind not the body holds communication with these ideas, perhaps without knowing what it knows. The action of a man rescuing a child from under the wheels of a car is likely to be something he could not explain himself, except by the predominance of the attraction to good and repulsion from evil: in this case the good of the child’s life and the evil of its death. Neither his own identity nor that of his object is in the mind of such an agent regarding his own action. I believe a significant shading is added to the argument by the phrase ‘true moral necessity’. Hazlitt means to draw a contrast with a kind of necessity that had been supposed prior to morals. For Godwin argued in Political Justice that a compelling power in reason itself could produce a ‘moral arithmetic’ adequate to direct all human actions. Godwin’s necessity was not (Hazlitt is saying) a true moral necessity. The power of imaginative excitement and aversion had no part in that mechanical theory, and a false necessity issued in the utilitarian conceit that there are measurable degrees of happiness which submit to be known by calculation. Hazlitt for his part does not believe that felicity and misery can be quantified. The difference, he says, between his theory of disinterested action and the selfish theory lies in his allowance that ‘what is personal or selfish in our affections’ is ‘the growth of time and habit’ (i, 12). He shows a ‘principle of a disinterested love of good as such, or for it’s own sake’ to be a motive prior to all others, a motive from which the selfish and the generous person both derive their moral characters (i, 12). In this sense, even self-love has at its source a feeling that cannot be called personal. Hazlitt later spoke with pride of this corollary of his argument, and the curious usage to which it led: ‘I never invented or gave a new and unauthorized meaning to any word but one single one (the term impersonal applied to feelings) and that was in an abstruse metaphysical discussion to express a very difficult distinction’ (‘On Familiar Style’, viii, 244). He has in mind the distinction between an objective view of action, which would judge the lives of persons ab extra, and a
Disinterested imagining and impersonal feeling 23 view that, though it must arise in the individual mind, nevertheless is ‘without respect of persons’ (i, 15). It is the latter view of action that Hazlitt expounds and chooses to call impersonal. As he summarizes his findings to this point, Hazlitt suggests the outline of an ethics of general benevolence, shorn of an all-sufficing power of reason. There exists, he says, a ‘natural connection between the idea of happiness and the desire of it, independently of any particular attachment to the person who is to feel it’ (i, 12). The enemy of independent feeling is dependent feeling. Shelley in his essay ‘On a Future State’ remarked similarly that ideal happiness was liable most to be thwarted by its counterfeit, a desire for permanence that habit projects from the present onto the future. The desire to be forever as we are; the reluctance to a violent and unexperienced change, which is common to all the animated and inanimate combinations of the universe, is, indeed, the secret persuasion which has given birth to the opinions of a future state.6 The belief in a self-interest sheltered by an unchanging self, which Hazlitt had traced to the conventional assurance of custom, Shelley describes as the ‘secret persuasion’ that extracts from our present life the promise of an afterlife. Both fallacies come from a wish to secure a consolation outside ourselves that will bear all the markings of ourselves. A cure for a pattern of delusion can only come from education, and the subject of moral education, or progress in the knowledge of good and evil, is never distinctly addressed in the course of Hazlitt’s Essay. Yet he touches on it in passing, and the treatment is suggestive. Hazlitt takes the phenomenon of a growing attachment to the good to illustrate the always possible work of the mind on an abstract idea. I conceive that the knowledge of many different sorts of good must lead to the love or desire of all these, and that this knowledge of various good must be accompanied with an intermediate, composite, or indefinite idea of good, itself the object of desire, because retaining the same general nature. (i, 13) Our thought of a good that transcends its constituent goods must mean that the idea is no longer immediate but ‘intermediate’. A person is able to evolve such an idea only by reflection over time. Hazlitt has sceptical things to say about the supposed derivation of public feeling from self-love and thereafter love of family, neighbourhood, and nation. This sequence itself is generally thought to be progressive: from selflove spring all the wider-ranging attachments. By contrast, Hazlitt thinks that the relation between self-love and love of any other entity is no more intimate than the relation between any two such entities. Self-love need not
24 David Bromwich be supposed stronger than the other affections, nor is its influence, in the nature of things, preponderant. And Hazlitt goes further. The other loyalties do not in fact proceed from self-love. We do not come closer to the source of virtue as we come closer to the self. Indeed, self-love bears the same relation to family affection as this does to the more general love of our neighbour, as the love of our neighbour does to that of our country, or as the love of our country does to that of mankind. (i, 15) The relation is a relation of habit, all the way down the line. As he pursues this thought, Hazlitt is writing against a passage from Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France: ‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind’.7 Hazlitt thinks from different premises to a different conclusion. ‘The love of mankind’, as he puts it, is an ‘already given, definite, and to a certain degree associated feeling’ (i, 15). It is as artificial as, but no more artificial than, the love of self or of country. We can proportion our anxiety for people’s welfare, not to their proximity but ‘to our sense of the use our assistance may be’ and ‘without respect of persons’ (i, 15). This finding of solid grounds for general benevolence – not from any warmth of fellow-feeling, but from the nature of imagination – discloses a hidden weakness of the selfish theory of action. That theory underrates the imaginative dimension of selfishness. To suppose the choice of good and the rejection of evil to be driven ‘solely by a regard to self is to suppose a state of indifference to both, which would make the existence of such a feeling as selfinterest utterly impossible’ (i, 18). You cannot know the difference between what is good and what is not good for you, so long as you are thinking of who you are and not of the nature of what is good. To love the good for oneself and to reject evil, one must also love the good in itself more than evil. Otherwise, one would love everything that happened to oneself on the ground that it happened to oneself. Hazlitt now brings in the example of the untaught child, which will become vital to his argument on the earliest motives for action. This is an experiment of imagining closer in manner to Rousseau than to Locke: the mind of the child does not resemble a blank slate so much as it resembles the mind of a man before the arts and sciences have channelled his impulses. The primitive feeling, says Hazlitt, of good and evil comes from the sensation of pain. The child on being burnt by fire remembers that this has happened to himself. He may intensify the recollection and make the pain a thing that signifies to him alone; but that is a delusive thought; and if the child thinks of a being ‘whom he must believe to be endued with the same feelings’ as himself, the idea of the pain experienced by that being will
Disinterested imagining and impersonal feeling 25 ‘affect him with the same sort of interest, the same sort of terror, and impel him to the same exertions for his relief’ (i, 22). This must be so unless we deny the power of making comparisons – almost identical with the power of thought – or unless we take it as self-evident that a man must love himself because he is himself. The transactions between our ideas and ourselves are not so predictable or uniform or circular. Ideas operate on the mind and body as much as sensations and memories do. This truth has been neglected, Hazlitt tells us, owing to a perverse restriction of the word idea to exclude pleasure and pain, ‘as if the essential quality in the feelings of pleasure, or pain, must entirely evaporate in passing through the imagination’ (i, 23). Wordsworth had a similar truth in mind when he observed in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that thoughts are ‘the representatives of all our past feelings’, and when he said of the Pedlar in The Excursion that ‘deep feelings had impressed / So vividly great objects that they lay / Upon his mind like substances’. Ideas and feelings carry ineradicable traces of each other. The implication for the theory of disinterested imagination seems to be that the intensity of a feeling matters most in our choice of action. Return now to the example of the child. In the face of the immediate danger from a fire, he may indeed think of himself as a being who continues the same from present to future, so that the pain is felt to threaten him although the fire is in the past. Yet ‘this very circumstance of his identifying himself with his future being … is itself the strongest instance that can be given of the force of the imagination’ (i, 29). The mind acts from the immediate stimulus of attraction or aversion, and it thinks about its choice by means of the fiction of continuous identity. However imposing the fiction, I must in reason affirm that my future self cannot supply my present motive, any more than a change in my present can affect my past. Something in the past or the present ‘may be the cause indeed but cannot be the effect of subsequent changes’ (i, 29). Yet the theory of self-interest may be said to stand or fall on this presumption: that I can so act as to dictate a congruence between my present self and the self for which I act. As Hazlitt has shown, it is the idea of a future change and not the change itself that impels me to act; the change, for all I know, may belong to another person; and in any case, what gives force to the idea is imagination. To restate the discovery: my relation to my future self is not more binding than my relation to anything else in the future. I do not have a ‘real positive interest’ in my own welfare which I must fail to have in the welfare of others (i, 31). Still, the argument having come so far, it may be asked why we pursue certain objects of attention and neglect others. The reason, says Hazlitt, is that, in the given case, the object ‘in which I am supposed to be interested without being sensible of it, is in itself interesting to me, that it is an object in which I can and must necessarily be interested, the moment it is known to me’ (i, 31). This assertion about a kind of thing ‘in itself interesting’ may seem to fall wide of the speculation permissible to Hazlitt as an
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empirical enquirer. Yet the experience is familiar enough from sports, and from the element of spectatorship in all the arts. A diving stab at a line drive by a shortstop holds the eye and grips the mind. A great jazz trumpeter said that when he played a high note once in a jam session, his rival ‘looked’, as if he could not help but look.8 Hazlitt put it this way in his essay ‘On Egotism’: Whatever interests, is interesting. I know of no way of estimating the real value of objects in all their bearings and consequences, but I can tell at once their intellectual value by the degree of passion or sentiment the very idea and mention of them excites in the mind. (xii, 161) Self-interest is not mandatory, and other incitements of interest can seem almost compulsive. It may be admitted that there is a principle of identity that ‘constantly connects us with ourselves, and makes each individual the same person distinct from every one else’ (i, 32). But what is this principle? A residue of the aggregate of my past and present sensations and my memories of them. The result does mean something, but it can mean only retrospectively, for the purpose of explanation and not discovery. The future is categorically different. My relation to my future self is as hypothetical as my relation to any other self. The analysis offered by Hazlitt of the association of a present with a future self runs parallel to Hume’s analysis of probability. We are ‘determined by custom to transfer the past to the future’, and ‘where the past has been entirely regular and uniform, we expect the event with the greatest assurance’.9 This suggests the corollary that the strongest belief in continuity is apt to be held by those who have lived sedate and unvaried lives. The inference is natural, to them. As extended to humanity at large, it gives an illusion of regularity that may render us docile and consistent in our own eyes; but what must happen, says Hazlitt, to bring about the illusion is quite odd. ‘We take the tablets of memory, reverse them, and stamp the image of the self on that, which as yet possesses nothing but the name’ (i, 41). The name should not be enough to render sympathy with our future self as reflexive as sympathy with our past self. Hazlitt thinks the reason for the human propensity to reverse ‘the tablets of memory’ has to do with familiarity and economy. We judge most readily what we can judge most easily. ‘I know better what my future feelings will be than what those of others will be in the like case’ (i, 42). Consider an obvious example, the buying of presents. It is easier to buy for myself than to buy for a person utterly unlike me. On the other hand, intimacy and fellow-feeling bring others closer – so much so that the relation may approach identity as our knowledge of them grows. That it stops short of actual identity is a condition of our existence as physical bodies, and not a moral necessity.
Disinterested imagining and impersonal feeling 27 Consider another example that Hazlitt does not give but might have. We cannot dream the dreams of other people. What if we could? Our imagination of them by that means would in no wise differ from our imagination of ourselves. ‘We always feel for others in proportion as we know from long acquaintance what the nature of their feelings is’ (i, 42–3). When we know them well enough, we can imagine their future feelings even if we cannot experience their future pleasure or pain. The bare recognition of this suffices to refute the hypothesis that the social affections all spring from association. If they did, ‘we must feel the strongest attachment to those from whom we had received, instead of those to whom we had done the greatest number of kindnesses’ (i, 43). Besides, sympathy with the future feelings of others can approach almost to the vividness of a sensation. We can sympathize with the sexual desire of another person; and it is plain from the example how far the ‘feeling of mutual sympathy increases the physical desires of both’ (i, 45). The feeling becoming conscious, in each, that the other is feeling the same, increases the intensity of the feeling in both. Shall we call this selfish or unselfish? Hazlitt’s previous description leaves the fairest emphasis. It is feeling about feeling, ‘without respect of persons’. The indispensability of imagination, in such extensions of feeling, rightly bears the final emphasis of the Essay. There is no ‘immediate connection’ between my present and my future self – none, that is, except by means of imagination. The sense of my present identity is a fact with no necessary implications beyond itself. ‘I am what I am in spite of the future’ (i, 48). Conversely, good or evil to my future self is what it is in spite of who I am. With sufficient warrant, therefore, Hazlitt concludes by affirming that the imagination is ‘naturally affected in a certain manner by the prospect of future good or evil’ to anyone (i, 49). An account might justifiably stop here. But it has seemed to me, in rereading Hazlitt’s early writings, that his political essays speak of the good of liberty in a way that sheds light on the argument of the Essay. Why would a writer taking his stand on experience rather than reason want to assert that anything is a good in itself? Hazlitt, I think, felt a special stake in this adjunct of his theory because he regarded liberty as the condition of all other possible goods, the one that opens a way which might otherwise have been closed. It is usual to connect his idea of the imagination with the possibility of sympathy afforded by works of art.10 This seems to me a justified inference from the Essay. But the most arresting early extensions of its argument occur in acts of political criticism, in which Hazlitt urges his countrymen not to assent to the restriction of their liberties, and not to be cowed by the proprietary claim of a narrow patriotism, which would transfer from present to future a loyalty we acquire only by looking from present to past. I call attention here to a few passages from Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, passages that Hazlitt used again in his Round Table essays ‘On Patriotism’ and ‘On Classical Education’.
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David Bromwich
Speaking of the national self-feeling on which Pitt has drawn to raise a popular clamour for war, Hazlitt remarks the danger of supposing that the elaboration of self-interest will yield a generous result for the public good. The habit of looking to oneself actually cooperates with indifference to the effects of a chosen course of action. Further, an indifference to liberty is not likely to increase the love of independence; nor is an exclusive regard to private gain likely to produce a disinterested concern for the public welfare. Mr. Pitt, in making war, always considered peace as an object perfectly indifferent in itself. (i, 112) This echoes Hazlitt’s assertion in the Essay that good in itself cannot be an indifferent thing to the imagination. So, too, the sense of liberty must correspond to a sense of a future outside oneself. Among England’s rulers during the Napoleonic wars, a defensive habit of self-regard took root and was justified as if it were a necessary bulwark for defence of the country. This rationalization, in turn, deepened the patriotic mood of fear. Hazlitt accordingly denounces the continuing reliance on Burke’s anti-revolutionary arguments when the evangelism of the revolutionists themselves has cooled. A school, he says, of anti-democratic writers has overturned ‘the foundation of all civil rights, and the very notion of liberty, with historical disquisitions proving that the popular spirit of political institutions was the bane of all internal quiet and happiness’ (i, 113). This may have been expedient at a time when the threat was acute – as a child must be told to run from a fire, when the fire is wild and the child is young. ‘Perhaps it was then necessary that we should be told, ex cathedrâ, that the people had nothing to do with the laws but to obey them’ (i, 113). But the habit has outrun the occasion, and ‘we ought to do every thing in our power to get rid of the effects of so dangerous a habit as soon as possible’ (i, 113). It is right that we should love the good that liberty affords in itself; and every fear that weakens this love must render us slavish: You give a manifest advantage to an enemy if you in any way lessen the sources of enthusiasm, or in any way check the ardour, confine the energy, degrade the sentiments, or discountenance the erect, manly, independent spirit of your country. (i, 113) The warning amounts to a prophecy against preventive laws that would abridge the rights of citizens, laws that are the natural offspring of every war, and that sometimes steal a march on opinion in situations that resemble war. There is a further and more sinister connection between the weakness of selfish patriotism and private interest. Men whose motive is gain can be
Disinterested imagining and impersonal feeling 29 relied on only so long as their cause rewards them. Yet the balance of profit and loss may shift while the cause remains the same. The love of gain, however active or persevering this principle may be in accomplishing its own particular ends, can never be safely trusted as an ally in a cause where there are other objects to be attended to. Men who are actuated by this sole principle will very obstinately, no doubt, defend their wealth, while they can retain it; but when that is no longer the case, they will think nothing else worth retaining, and meanly compromise their independence for their safety. (i, 114) To make fidelity dependent on profit is a sign of the passage from selfgovernment to domination. The commercial backers of the empire ‘will defend England as connected with her colonies, with her proud canopies of Eastern state, her distant spicy groves and the spoils of her Western isles; but will they defend her as she is England, as their country?’ (i, 114). As they fail to imagine the common good, their sense of the identity of the nation comes to refer more and more to its possessions. If there is a remedy for such contracted self-interest, it is to be found in education. Hazlitt looks for the best result from what he calls classical education, precisely because the value of its objects cannot be fixed in utilitarian terms. Classical education reminds us, by the force of its acts of attention, that ‘there is something really great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion’ (i, 115). And that train of thought to Hazlitt is suggestive of ‘something in the very idea of good’. He goes on to say, surprisingly, but not at all superfluously, that ‘the spirit of trade is the very reverse of all this’ (i, 115). Trade makes self-interest determine value, and the spirit of trade, relying as it does on association and probability, transfers the past to the future in all our reckonings. It gives to those who have. The spirit of freedom, as Hazlitt understands it, cares for those whom we can imagine as neighbours, and is willing to call neighbours all whom we can imagine as ourselves.
2
Hazlitt and the Idea of Identity James Mulvihill
I am not the same thing, but many different things. (i, 35)
William Hazlitt’s account of his transition from philosophy to belles lettres sounds quite definitive. An essay ‘On the Causes of Popular Opinion’ actually recalls a moment when, having ‘resolved to turn over a new leaf’, he rejected the ‘dry and meagre’ style of metaphysics and adopted a more ‘flighty and paradoxical’ style (xvii, 312). Hazlitt alludes here to his first published work, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) with which he hoped to make his mark as a philosopher. That the writing of the Essay was a discouraging process is suggested in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ which recalls the hopeful young metaphysician attempting to resume his writing after an inspiring first encounter with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, only to give up after managing ‘a few meagre sentences in the skeleton-style of a mathematical demonstration’ (xvii, 114). While he would finally complete the Essay some seven years later – claiming for it ‘an important metaphysical discovery … nearly as subtle and original as anything in Hume or Berkeley’ – Hazlitt had clearly come to believe that his prospects lay in a more popular vein (xvii, 312). Among other things, ‘On the Causes of Popular Opinion’ considers how authorial style is shaped by reader expectations and reflects on the dilemma this poses for authors: ‘If I am told at one time that my writings are as heavy as lead, and at another, that they are more light than the gossamer – what resource have I but to choose between the two? I could say, if this were the place, what those writings are’ (xvii, 311). When he looks back over his career, then – the essay was written in 1828 near the end of that career – he describes a body of writings in which metaphysics figures as only one of many discrete subjects (‘painting, poetry, prose, plays, politics, parliamentary speakers, metaphysical lore, books, men, and things’ [xvii, 313]). His conclusion, that ‘there is some point, some fancy, some feeling, some taste shown in treating of these’, is thus modest but also somewhat limiting in its appeal to largely belletristic criteria (xvii, 313). Perhaps the question of ‘what those writings are’, however, speaks to something more. If Hazlitt declines to give an explicit answer to this
Hazlitt and the idea of identity 31 question, his belief that there is ‘some point’ in the journalistic work that succeeded the Essay suggests possible continuity between both. A subsequent observation, that ‘old habits will prevail; and I hardly ever set about a paragraph or a criticism, but there was an undercurrent of thought, or some generic distinction on which the whole turned’, indicates that this continuity would reflect what is in the same passage termed the ‘original bent’ of the mind producing the Essay (xvii, 312). This essay argues that the habit of ‘generic distinction’ on which Hazlitt claims his writings turn is what makes them what they are. It considers how identity, the idea of identity, conditions these writings, from the Essay on the Principles of Human Action onwards. The Essay’s ‘metaphysical discovery’ is a theory of natural disinterestedness that challenges empirical hedonism. Hazlitt begins from the premise that while the mind is interested in either the past, present, or future, the future alone is an object of ‘rational or voluntary pursuit’ given the fact that neither past nor present can be changed from what they already are (i, 1). Thus the mind is naturally self-interested only in relation to past and present, the past by means of memory and the present by means of actual consciousness, since ‘As an affair of sensation, or memory, I can feel no interest in any thing but what relates to myself in the strictest sense’ (i, 1). Yet no such exclusive considerations apply to future objects, for no faculty gives the self a direct interest in the future distinct from the interests of others in this regard. As Hazlitt argues, The imagination, by means of which alone I can anticipate future objects, or be interested in them, must carry me out of myself into the feelings of others by one and the same process by which I am thrown forward as it were into my future being, and interested in it. (i, 1–2) Fundamental to this theory are assumptions about the nature of identity, what Hazlitt elsewhere terms the ‘determinate lines of true or supposititious character’ (xii, 234). This phrase from an essay ‘On Personal Character’ published in The Plain Speaker (1826) nicely picks up on the habit of ‘generic distinction’ that Hazlitt sees as underlying his writings. It expresses at once what is real in our notions of character and what is only apparent. For Hazlitt, character is ‘true’ to the extent that it emerges from reality, either experienced or remembered, and ‘supposititious’ to the extent that it is a mere fiction. The Essay disposes of the idea that we can have a ‘true’ interest in feelings we have not yet directly experienced, arguing that the identity we posit between our present and future selves is ‘supposititious’: This kind of reasoning, which in itself is all along founded in a mere play of words, could not have gained the assent of thinking men but for the force with which the idea of self habitually clings to the mind of
32 James Mulvihill every man, binding it as with a spell, deadening it’s discriminating powers, and spreading the confused associations which belong only to past and present impressions over the whole of our imaginary existence. It therefore becomes difficult to separate ideas which have been thus knit together by custom, or ‘by a long tract of time, by the use of language, and want of reflection.’ If it were possible for a man’s particular successive interests to be all bound up in one general feeling of self-interest as they are all comprehended under the same word, self, or if a man on the rack really felt no more than he must have done from the apprehension of the same punishment a year before, there would be some foundation for this reasoning, which supposes the mind to have the same absolute interest in it’s own feelings both past, present, and to come. (i, 2–3) Hazlitt’s understanding of identity thus turns on his belief that we cannot be interested in the future in the same way that we are naturally interested in past and present. That the notion that we can may be dismissed as a ‘mere play of words’ means that the same might be said of the way our ‘particular successive interests’, real and hypothetical alike, express themselves in the single word ‘self’. What, then, is the self? The Essay’s conception of selfhood is unmistakably empirical, not to say nominalistic. Of even those past and present selves in which we can have a real interest, only the present self, directly conscious of its existence in a present moment, is fully realized at any given time. By contrast, the self of even a moment before is historically mediated, the product of memory or consciousness recalled. This is not to underestimate the force of the idea of identity, however, and Hazlitt acknowledges that ‘there is a principle of some sort or other which constantly connects us with ourselves, and makes each individual the same person distinct from everyone else’ (i, 32). What he queries is not the validity of the self per se, but absolute assumptions about ‘continued personal identity’ (i, 28). As he observes in the Essay, ‘the individual is never the same for two moments together. What is true of him at one time is never (that we know of) exactly and particularly true of him at any other time’ (i, 29–30). David Hume similarly argues that, far from being unitary, identity is manifold, ‘nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’; the belief that this manifold nature constitutes a distinct identity Hume explains as a fiction arising from ‘our common way of thinking’.1 For thinking Hazlitt might say speaking (‘a mere play of words’), but his concept of identity is similarly manifold. The Essay variously describes the self as an ‘intercommunity of thoughts and feelings’, ‘that combination of ideas which represents any individual person’, and ‘the continued resemblance of my thoughts to my previous thoughts, of my sensations to my previous sensations’ (i, 11, 33, 36).
Hazlitt and the idea of identity 33 Yet ‘resemblance’ need not imply unity, for individuality relates not to the similarity or identity of things but to ‘an extraordinary degree of connection between things neither the same nor similar’ (i, 35n). The following passage explains the self as an ongoing and complex process of rationalization in which difference, not similarity, is the starting point: In the first place, we abstract the successive modifications of our being, and particular temporary interests into one simple nature, and general principle of self-interest, and then make use of this nominal abstraction as an artificial medium to compel those particular actual interests into the same close affinity and union with each other, as different lines meeting in the same centre must have a mutual communication with each other. (i, 41) In effect, the self for Hazlitt is a constant dialectic of experience and abstraction, the fact that it is a self indicating the limits of Hazlitt’s nominalism. Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius, then, published along with the Essay, asserts that ‘the aggregate of many actual sensations is, we here plainly see, a totally different thing from the collective idea, comprehension, or consciousness of those sensations as many things, or any of their relations to each other’ (i, 69). Just as we imaginatively project our selfish interests into an as yet unexperienced future, so we project a coherent sense of being through time, continually squaring our particular successive experiences with an imaginatively realized identity, a self. Hazlitt’s writings are conditioned by his epistemology to a degree that evidently struck him when in 1828 he looked back over a career spanning almost three decades. The throwaway line with which he attempts to characterize the self behind these writings, that ‘They are not, then, so properly the works of an author by profession, as the thoughts of a metaphysician expressed by a painter’, locates that self not where we might expect to find it – in a literary context – but in Hazlitt’s early false-starts as a metaphysician and a painter (xvii, 311). Hazlitt seems here to elide his authorial identity in this portrait of the philosopher as portraitist, though perhaps he simply takes it for granted. Elsewhere, he reflects on authorship as a compound of different disciplinary methods. Lectures on the Comic Writers portrays eighteenth century periodical writing as heir to both Bacon and Montaigne, combining personal expression with empirical observation as the essayist applies to ordinary life the inductive methods of natural philosophy and by this means ‘makes familiar with the world of men and women, records their actions, assigns their motives, exhibits their whims, characterizes their pursuits in all their singular and endless variety’ (vi, 91). The writer’s sphere thus comprehends a good deal, both as regards its ‘endless variety’ and its defining ‘motives’. For Hazlitt this sphere, by which he effectively means what we mean when we say culture, is comparable to personal identity in its
34 James Mulvihill complex nature. A Round Table essay entitled ‘On Patriotism – A Fragment’ thus describes nationhood in essentially epistemological terms, noting that the modern state emerges not from ‘physical or local attachment’ but from reflection: ‘Our country is a complex, abstract existence, recognized only by the understanding. It is an immense riddle, containing numberless modifications of reason and prejudice, of thought and passion’ (iv, 67). Yet somehow emerging from the mass of particulars is the idea of a state, a consciousness that contains all these particulars within a distinct identity.2 Considered in this light, John Kinnaird’s estimate of a work like The Spirit of the Age as ‘impressive in total effect but without apparent design’ begs the question of where the effect originates.3 By ‘design’, of course, Kinnaird means literary design and in this respect The Spirit of the Age is something of a miscellany, its profiles of twenty-four leading figures in the age having originally appeared in The New Monthly Magazine as a series entitled ‘Spirits of the Age’. Their subsequent republication in book form may thus simply reflect Hazlitt’s opportunistic habit of recycling his material. Yet if the title change from ‘spirits’ to ‘spirit’ is not gratuitous, then there must be operating in this work some totalizing assumption about the age and its identity. The design of Spirit of the Age is less a structural feature than an epistemological premise. Constituently complex in its own right, this work is exemplary of Hazlitt’s essayistic practice in that it attempts to discern the ‘determinate lines’ of identity as they emerge from the totality of individual and collective experience that is the age. For Hazlitt identity is ‘impressive’ not as a matter of formal design but as the effect of many particulars issuing in the idea of a self. The Spirit of the Age profiles a number of different selves who, highly complex and even contradictory in their individual beings, somehow add up to a characteristic whole whose ‘total effect’ is more than the sum of these equally, if diversely, impressive parts. One of them, the Reverend Edward Irving, was at the height of a brief but sensational celebrity when he was profiled in The Spirit of the Age. Irving drew huge congregations to his Caledonian Chapel in Hatton Garden, where he preached against the corruptions of modern London in the mid-1820s, his sensational strictures extending even to the noble and eminent who flocked to his sermons. Carriages lined Hatton Garden and the papers were full of him. Three years later, he was already fading from the public mind, never to recover from either his meteoric fame or the punishing obscurity that swiftly followed. But even as Irving allowed himself to be carried along by this popularity, he deliberately exploited its motivating element – what his friend Thomas Carlyle would term a ‘most transcendental I-ety’.4 Carlyle refers here to the quality of ego enabling Irving to insinuate himself into the popular consciousness and become, as Hazlitt nicely puts it, ‘the God of his own idolatry by being that of others’ (xi, 43). While there is perhaps a hint of Scottish moralizing in Carlyle’s estimate, Hazlitt explains Irving’s celebrity epistemologically, remarking that ‘he himself is the only idea with which he has yet enriched the public mind’ (xi, 45). This is no simple idea
Hazlitt and the idea of identity 35 in Locke’s sense, however, for Hazlitt attributes Irving’s popular appeal to what he calls ‘a transposition of ideas’: If the subject of these remarks had come out as a player, with all his advantages of figure, voice, and action, we think he would have failed; if, as a preacher, he had kept within the strict bounds of pulpit-oratory, he would scarcely have been much distinguished among his Calvinistic brethren: as a mere author, he would have excited attention rather by his quaintness and affectation of an obsolete style and mode of thinking, than by any thing else. But he has contrived to jumble these several characters together in an unheard-of and unwarranted manner, and the fascination is altogether irresistible. (xi, 38) If this sounds largely dismissive, Hazlitt is unimpressed only by the parts constituting the largely impressive whole that is Edward Irving. What Hazlitt’s profile goes on to describe in the compound idea Irving presents to the public mind is a range of topical associations, an exotic ‘I-ety’ attaching itself to everything from popular boxers to Scott’s vogue of the Scottish picturesque with its wild border-outlaws and fierce covenanters. Further complicating Irving’s appeal, moreover, and clinching its novelty for his urban constituency, is its contrarian nature, the fiercely primitive zeal with which he condemns the very public to whom he appeals. Hazlitt notes in this regard that ‘Mr. Irving keeps the public in awe by insulting all their favourite idols’, thus setting himself in opposition to the age so definitively as to have become part of its self-conscious modernity (xi, 41). Irving, as Hazlitt notes, ‘found out the secret of attracting by repelling’, and yet his seemingly irresistible fascination would soon pass (xi, 41). What changed? – Irving or the age? The similar fate of a very different figure, William Godwin, prompts Hazlitt to ask: ‘Is truth then so variable? Is it one thing at twenty, and another at forty? Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below zero in 1814?’ (xi, 17). In the mercurial careers of Godwin and Irving, Hazlitt describes an age that is not only constituently diverse but is also never the same from one moment to the next. No individual remains constant through time, though an idea of identity connects the innumerable moments of consciousness that compose individuality, so that one’s perspective on truth (or celebrity) will necessarily change from age twenty to forty. As he also observes in the Essay on the Principles of Human Action, when people make assumptions about a person’s identity ‘they do not mean that he is the same at twenty that he is at sixty, but their general idea of him includes both these extremes, and therefore the same man, that is collective idea, is both the one and the other’ (i, 33–4). Acclaiming genius at one moment and ignoring it the next, then, the age’s characteristic modernity is irreducible to any single defining element, just as in Hazlitt’s epistemology, character is not one thing but many things somehow constituting a distinct
36
James Mulvihill
whole, ‘personality’ being (in the words of the Essay) ‘nothing more than conscious individuality’ (i, 36). Though Hazlitt elsewhere dismisses a preoccupation with the modern as a ‘strange error of our infatuated self-love’ (vi, 177), he knows that the phenomenon and the consciousness are one and the same, much as John Stuart Mill would identify the very tendency to conceive of a defining ‘spirit’ in an age as ‘the dominant idea’ of this age.5 Hazlitt’s zeitgeist is simply what it is – in the Essay’s words, ‘Each thing is itself’ – embracing even factious selves like Godwin and Irving in its ‘conscious individuality’ (i, 33, 36). The peculiar impressions these selves have made on their age are the necessary result of what they and the age imagine themselves to be from one moment to the next. Out of the anomalous and successive elements of constituent character, they project themselves as distinct, consistent ‘identities’, and are in turn among the innumerable disparate elements of being composing the collective consciousness that is, for Hazlitt, cultural identity. That the idea of identity informs Hazlitt’s reflections on art is evident in the priority assigned to portraiture in his art criticism. Given its subtitle, indeed, ‘Contemporary Portraits’, The Spirit of the Age might be compared to a portrait gallery organized around some defining idea or theme, like Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. Its essays often begin or end with deftlysketched physical descriptions – though the portrait of Coleridge curiously resolves itself into a Romantic landscape (‘He who has seen a mouldering tower by the side of a chrystal lake, hid by the mist, but glittering in the wave below, may conceive the dim, gleaming, uncertain intelligence of his eye’ [xi, 29]). More typical is the sketch of Jeremy Bentham which looks beyond mere resemblance to discover mental disposition in physical attitude: ‘His eye is quick and lively; but it glances not from object to object, but from thought to thought’ (xi, 6). For Hazlitt, indeed, portraiture is less a matter of likeness than of tendency, an attempt to capture in the seemingly synchronic dimensions of the pictorial some sense of historically emergent character. His discussion of Titian’s portraits in The Plain Speaker locates their superiority in a quality of ‘intense personal character’ seeming to project itself through time as well as space: Titian seized upon the lines of character in the most original and connected point of view. Thus in his celebrated portrait of Hippolito de Medici, there is a keen, sharpened expression that strikes you, like a blow from the spear that he holds in his hand. The look goes through you; yet it has no frown, no startling gesticulation, no affected penetration. It is quiet, simple, but it almost withers you. The whole face and each separate feature is cast in the same acute or wedge-like form. The forehead is high and narrow, the eye-brows raised and coming to a point in the middle, the nose straight and peaked, the mouth contracted and drawn up at the corners, the chin acute, and the two sides of the face slanting to a point. The number of acute angles which the lines of the
Hazlitt and the idea of identity 37 face form, are, in fact, a net entangling the attention and subduing the will. The effect is felt at once, though it asks time and consideration to understand the cause. It is a face which you would beware of rousing into anger or hostility, as you would beware of setting in motion some complicated and dangerous machinery. The possessor of it, you may be sure, is no trifler. Such, indeed, was the character of the man. This is to paint true portrait and true history. (xii, 286–7) To have captured the subject’s character as it truly ‘was’ is not merely to have recovered an historical fact – anyway how can Hazlitt know what Hippolito de Medici was really like? – but to convey the independent experience of historical authenticity. This ‘effect’ is ‘felt at once’ yet takes time to understand because it issues from a sense of historical causation potential in the simultaneity of the visual representation. While this face is portrayed in repose, the component lines of its likeness (‘each separate feature is cast in the same acute or wedge-like form’) all tend toward an impressive issue – in anger or hostility or some other characteristic reaction immanent in a ‘connected point of view’. Character thus reveals itself here as the cumulative effect of historical tendency. Hazlitt’s conclusion that Titian has achieved ‘true portrait and true history’ challenges a prevailing generic (and ethical) distinction in lateGeorgian painting between portraiture and history. While inclined like many of his contemporaries to look askance at portraiture’s commercial aspect, however – even the English ‘Rembrandt’, John Opie, characterized it as ‘the parasite of personal vanity’ – Hazlitt believes that good portraiture is more than a branch of English trade.6 His criterion for good portraiture, moreover, also applies to historical painting. If good portraiture is historical, good historical painting contains portraiture, both genres finding a common ground in what Hazlitt calls ‘characteristic expression’ (xviii, 108). From this view, an assertion he makes in an essay on the Elgin Marbles, that ‘Portrait treats of objects as they are; history of the events and changes to which they are liable’, makes too easy a distinction between branches of painting that both represent being in time (xviii, 161). What an object is, after all, is what ‘events and changes’ have made it. The difference lies in emphasis. In his essay ‘On the Ideal’, then, Hazlitt makes an Aristotelian distinction between the two branches of painting, arguing that ‘History-painting is imaginary portrait-painting. The portrait-painter gives you an individual, such as he is in himself, and vouches for the truth of the likeness as a matter of fact: the historical painter gives you the individual such as he is likely to be’ (xviii, 78). In both instances, however, character is a product of history and nature: That is not the finest historical head which has least the look of nature, but which has most the look of nature, if it has the look of history also.
38 James Mulvihill But it has the look of nature, i.e. of striking and probable nature, – as it has a marked and decided character, and not a character of indifference: and as the features and expression are consistent with themselves, not as they are common to others. The ideal is that which answers to the idea of something, and not to the idea of any thing, or of nothing. Any countenance strikes most upon the imagination, either in a picture or in reality, which has most distinctness from others, and most identity with itself. The keeping in the character, not the want of character, is the essence of history. (xviii, 78) What seems convoluted in this passage’s discussion of nature, history, and character is the result of its attempt both to distinguish and associate these elements. By ‘look of nature’, Hazlitt means naturalistic, an unmannered representation avoiding the theatrical heroism to which historical painting can descend. Such expression will necessarily be historical, but in the sense that it reflects nature emerging as itself through time in the form of ‘a marked and decided character’. Just as Hazlitt argues in a series of essays on Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses that portraiture should convey the ‘fullest representation of individual nature’ possible, so here he rejects neo-classical theories of ideal character in historical painting, arguing that the ‘best portrait’ is essentially the same as the ‘finest historical head’ (xviii, 75). Where Reynolds favours a concept of an identity abstracted of individuality, for Hazlitt identity is ‘the general idea or character of a particular face, i.e. the aggregate impression resulting from all the parts combined’ (xviii, 76). The ‘finest historical head’ is natural because it is distinct, and historical because it represents being in time and so has ‘most identity with itself’ – the ‘connected point of view’ Hazlitt discerns in Titian’s portrait. By ‘essence of history’, then, Hazlitt means not an attenuation but an accumulation of experience issuing in a distinct nature. What he understands as ‘historical expression’ is the incremental totality of many particular causes and effects coalescing in a single characteristic moment of expression. Hazlitt’s estimate of the Romantic theatre similarly turns on questions of identity. These questions concern the effect of a performance not only as it speaks to an authoritative text but also to more local but equally influential traditions of performance associated with a given play or role. Hazlitt’s reservations about the Regency stage and its pandering to audiences hungry for sensational effect are well known. In an essay on The Merchant of Venice, for instance, he argues that the finer points of Shakespeare’s characters are lost in the translation from text to stage: The stage is not in general the best place to study our author’s characters in. It is too often filled with traditional common-place conceptions of the part, handed down from sire to son, and suited to the taste of the great vulgar and the small. (iv, 324)
Hazlitt and the idea of identity 39 Yet the very circumstances he cites as working against the expression of authentic character are also acknowledged as contributing to a play’s total impression at any given time. Thus, while his discussion of The Merchant of Venice makes a case for the richness of Shylock’s character not conveyed in performance – ‘so rooted was our habitual impression of the part from seeing it caricatured in the representation, that it was only from a careful perusal of the play itself that we saw our error’ – it also suggests the power of performance to shape (or distort) our sense of a play (iv, 324). Edmund Kean probably conceived his Shylock as much in reaction to other actors as in accordance with Shakespeare, but his ability to revise (or simply restore) Hazlitt’s ‘idea’ of this character makes it clear that Hazlitt would henceforth read the text in the light of this performance. What even deprecating references to acting traditions ‘handed down from sire to son’ suggest about a play is that its ‘total effect’ or impression is a compound of many different elements. This circumstance makes theatre problematic from the views of both representation and reception. In Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth, Hazlitt reflects not only on the potential of theatrical representation for getting the text wrong but on its transience as well: ‘Authors after their deaths live in their works; players only in their epitaphs and the breath of common tradition’ (vi, 91). This at least implies the possibility of memorable (if not preservable) performances, however – evidently the point of Hazlitt’s observation later in this work that ‘Mrs. Siddons has left the stage and us to mourn her loss’ (vi, 247). Beyond the obvious assumption that Mrs. Siddons must have been doing something right to justify regretting her retirement from acting, there is the fact that Hazlitt remembers her at all, that he remembers the actress on the basis of the innumerable performances that, in their incremental totality, are Mrs. Siddons for the play-going public. It might be added that, for this public if not for the closeted readers of Shakespeare with whom Hazlitt commiserates on occasion, the idea of Mrs. Siddons extends itself to both the roles and plays with which she is associated in the minds of her audience. The result is a concept of the dramatic text as a continually evolving identity, never the same from production to production or even from performance to performance, a sense of the play itself – that is, the idea of the play – not as a fixed unitary entity but as something of an imaginary construction or fictional projection. That a play might over time even depart from its original text is almost axiomatic for Hazlitt given his admiration for actors like Kean who, in his words, ‘treads close indeed upon the genius of his author’ (iv, 256). In a review of Kean’s Iago, then, he states that We have already stated it as our opinion, that Mr. Kean is not a literal transcriber of his author’s text; he translates his characters with great freedom and ingenuity into a language of his own; but at the same time we cannot help preferring his liberal and spirited dramatic versions, to the dull, literal, common-place monotony of his competitors. (v, 190)
40 James Mulvihill This is not say that Kean wholly violates the text but that the idea of a play is not contained entirely within a text. Hazlitt’s approving review of Kean’s Iago, indeed, suggests the extent to which a dramatic character – and a play partially defined by that character – is synonymous with its acted presentation, the criterion of excellence being such performances as have become definitive and, in effect, characteristic. In his suggestively-titled Shakespearean Constitutions, Jonathan Bate describes Shakespeare’s plays as dramatic texts ‘constituted by a series of historical moments, by their own afterlife of performance and interpretation’.7 Hazlitt’s idea of the play is in this respect comparable to personal identity in that it projects an imaginary whole greater than the sum of innumerable ‘historical moments’ from which it emerges. For Hazlitt, indeed, even the text itself is a complex idea. In his seemingly one-sided comparison of actors and authors, he seems to discount the respective epistemologies of theatre and book culture alike. In the one case, he overlooks what he elsewhere shows to be drama’s complexly constituted character, the inhering of dramatic identity in both a text and a tradition of performances associated with that text. In the other, he separates mortal humanity from material text so definitively as to seem to deny the mediating consciousness through which, as writers and readers, we define ourselves through books. Yet the subject of books is a personal one for Hazlitt, whose reflections on the printed text often underscore the problematic nature of identity. Emerging from what Walter Ong terms ‘a romantic print culture’,8 such reflections reveal the impress of print on a life in which, as the essayist himself once observed, ‘our successive years only present us with fainter and fainter copies of the first proof-impressions’ (xii, 302). Hazlitt’s material conception of books should not be underestimated. As an erstwhile painter and a student of empirical psychology, he brings to his reading a concreteness of perception that enables him to view the physical dimensions of the printed text not as an accidental circumstance of transmission but as an essential element in the teleology of knowledge. At the same time, this materialism is only one aspect of an epistemology of reading that reaches beyond referentiality into the realm of subjective impression: For myself, not only are the old ideas of the contents of the work brought back to my mind in all their vividness, but the old associations of the faces and persons of those I then knew, as they were in their lifetime – the place where I sat to read the volume, the day when I got it, the feeling of the air, the fields, the sky – return, and all my early impressions with them. This is better to me – those places, those times, those persons, and those feelings that come across me as I retrace the story and devour the page, are to me better far than the wet sheets of the last new novel from the Ballantyne press. (xii, 222)
Hazlitt and the idea of identity 41 In this passage from ‘On Reading Old Books’, a familiar volume takes Hazlitt past the meaning of the characters printed on the page to recover ‘early impressions’ associated with a past reading of the volume and, through this act of rereading, to reconnect past and present selves. In this way, the material impression of print is translated into an emotional impression much as particular landscapes in the Romantic lyric act as catalysts for reconstructing a sense of continuing identity through memory and association. If the unstable romantic self is traditionally defined against the permanence of nature, then, here it finds its definition both within and beyond the margins of the print text. Authorial identity relies similarly on print’s mental impressions. Hazlitt’s contention that authors live on more tangibly in their productions than actors fails to consider that fame and reputation inhere in consciousness rather than in objects, though objects may supplement (and perpetuate) that consciousness. While the author’s reputation depends on material corroboration, numbers of editions, print-runs and so on, it enters the privileged realm of what Hazlitt understands as ‘fame’ at the very point where it slips its material moorings and becomes an idea understood, in the words of his Lectures on the English Poets, ‘independently of time and circumstances’ (v, 144). Hazlitt’s distinction between a passing celebrity and durable fame rests on the premise that ‘the one is immediate and personal, the other ideal and abstracted’ (v, 144). Of Paradise Lost, then, in ‘Whether Genius is Conscious of Its Powers?’, Hazlitt observes that Milton himself could not read it, as we do, with the weight of impression that a hundred years of admiration have added to it … with the sense of the number of editions it has passed through with still increasing reputation, with the tone of solidity, time-proof, which it has received from the breath of cold, envious maligners, with the sound which the voice of Fame has lent to every line of it! (xii, 117) Fame here is nevertheless more than the sum of its defining historical circumstances. Like Hazlitt’s composite model of personal identity, it is an imaginary construction extrapolated from these innumerable constituent particulars, a ‘still increasing reputation’ that transcends even as it is transformed by each successive reading. As Gadamer observes of classical texts, ‘timelessness is a mode of historical being’.9 A famous and often-cited claim of Hazlitt’s, that he had not altered any of his opinions since the age of sixteen, seems at once to argue for his intellectual consistency and against his theory of identity (xvii, 22–3). Yet this theory’s dualistic proposition, that identity is both compound and distinct – never the same from moment to moment, yet the continuing focus of consciousness and perception – is the central fact towards which Hazlitt’s
42
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writings tend, the habit of ‘generic distinction’ on which they turn. The question of ‘what those writings are’, then, ultimately finds its answer in this very tendency, for it is in such tendencies – what the Essay terms ‘the common concurrence of many things to some given end’ – that identity defines itself (i, 35).
3
‘The Future in the Instant’ Hazlitt’s Essay and Shakespeare Philip Davis
When on the heath, in act 4 scene 3, Lear first encounters Poor Tom, the king at once cries out at the sight of this piteous naked madman: ‘Didst thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to this?’ That is to say: gave all as I did, and came to this, like me. And then again he exclaims: ‘What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?’ and finally: ‘Nothing could have subdued nature / To such a lowness but his unkind daughters’. It was this speech before the disguised Edgar that time and again – in ‘On Poetry in General’, in ‘Sir Walter Scott, Racine and Shakespear’ and in the essay on King Lear in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays – Hazlitt was to remember in conflated form as being at the very heart of Shakespeare’s tragic poetry: ‘Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this’, ‘Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this pass’ (v, 5; xii, 342). It is not, then, that Lear simply asks this bare man who he is or what is the matter with him. Far more violently, he seems immediately to recognize something about him. To some interpreters, this may be nothing more than Lear’s shocking egoism: everything, everyone he encounters is now no more than an instant image of him and his own story. But to Hazlitt, I believe, such a response would be the mere static, secondary language of retrospective explanation. In the dramatic living present of the theatre, the line comes dynamically as a primal shock: ‘what a bewildered amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to conceive of any other cause of misery than that which has bowed it down, and absorbs all other sorrow in its own!’ (‘On Poetry in General’, v, 5). Madly, even as he feels he is reaching out to Tom, Lear is actually turning back inward upon himself. For similarly, as Hazlitt recalls in both ‘On Poetry in General’ and ‘Sir Walter Scott, Racine, Shakespear’: ‘Lear calls on the Heavens to take his part, for “they are old like him”’ (v, 4; xii, 342). Yet ‘egoism’ is not the word Hazlitt chooses to describe such behaviour: more innocently, more frighteningly and instinctively, what characterizes Lear here, says Hazlitt, is ‘a wrench of the imagination’ (v, 5, my italics). For here still, in his turn towards Tom, are the rudiments of imagination, thought and sympathy in Lear – even though they are trapped within the distortions of a ruined mind.
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In other words, as Hazlitt had first put it so daringly in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action, ‘Self love … is in it’s fundamental principle the same with disinterested benevolence’ (i, 2). The mad egoism and the sudden sense of violent sympathy in fact come from the same source and are involved in each other. ‘Didst thou give all to thy daughters?’ It is this immediately and explosively dramatic language of Shakespeare that Hazlitt trusts, rather than the later, slower language of retrospective mental explanation: ‘Other dramatic writers give us very fine versions and paraphrases of nature: but Shakespear, together with his own comments, gives us the original text, that we may judge for ourselves (‘Hamlet’, iv, 233). The idea that the calculation of selfinterest necessarily dominates the human world, that biologically self must always come first for us, is itself one of those belated ‘paraphrases’ that philosophers such as Hobbes have subsequently imposed upon our nature. In the earlier original text, which Shakespeare offers and which the Essay on the Principles of Human Action seeks to recover, life is more dynamic and passionately unpredictable than that. It is sudden feelings that first affect us, before ever we know to what or to whom they refer – feelings that exist as an energy anterior to the establishment of the conscious self; feelings that are thus primarily faster, more instinctive and more innocent than the calculations of self-interest: ‘It is great folly to think of deducing our desire of happiness and fear of pain from a principle of self-love, instead of deducing self-love itself from our natural desire of happiness and fear of pain’ (i, 18). Self-love is not the original principle of human action. It is a later conceptual paraphrase, and such conceptual paraphrases are like bad paintings: ‘by the time that the picture is painted, all is over’ (‘On Poetry in General’, v, 10). But poetry to Hazlitt – and in particular dramatic poetry – is about process, time and movement, not stasis. It is about life coming into being in the very midst of ‘the interval of expectation and suspense, while our hopes and fears are strained to the highest pitch of breathless agony’ (v, 10). Thus Hazlitt quotes from Julius Caesar: ‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion, all the interim is / Like a phantasma or a hideous dream’ (v, 10). It is through drama that thinking is experienced as taking place in the midst of living time. As Macbeth finds on the death of his wife, there is barely time for realization in the Shakespearean world, let alone rationalizing: ‘She should have died hereafter. / There would have been a time for such a word’ (Macbeth 5.3.16–17). It is therefore no surprise that when Hazlitt comes to rewrite his Essay on the Principles of Human Action as two essays on ‘Self-Love and Benevolence’ for the New Monthly Magazine in October and December 1828, he should cite Shakespeare – in particular Macbeth: The future, were it the next moment, were it an object nearest and dearest to our hearts, is a dull blank, opaque, impervious to sense as an
‘The future in the instant’ 45 object close to the eye of the blind, did not the ray of reason and reflection enlighten it. We can never say to its fleeting, painted essence, ‘Come let me clutch thee!’ it is a thing of air, a phantom that flies before us, and we follow it, and with respect to all but our past and present sensations, which are no longer any thing to action, we totter on the brink of nothing … We have no presentiment of what awaits us, making us feel the future in the instant. (xx, 179–80) Drama is not founded upon what we already think we think, or assume we are, on the basis of a past sense of reality. It is about immersion in the midst of action, about present time reaching imaginatively towards a future for itself which is as yet by definition unknown, uncreated and untried. In that context ‘the word imagination’, says Hazlitt, is not to do ‘with merely fictitious situations and events … such as never will have a real existence … and which consequently do not admit of action’ (i, 23). On the contrary, imagination is the quick faculty that lets us conceive of the very existence of a future and makes us capable of creating it by acting towards it. In its fast transience, then, drama and in particular Shakespearean drama are for Hazlitt the image of life itself – leaving the past behind, in the pull of the present towards a future. It is the struggle of a life-force to create a future just ahead of itself – calling into being a space that its thinker can then occupy. Drama is thus the great creative test of our preconceptions, the great unplanned experiment upon our very nature, in the sheer instant of speech and act: As, in our dreams, we hold conversations with ourselves, make remarks or communicate intelligence, and have no idea of the answer which we shall receive, and which we ourselves are to make, till we hear it; so, the dialogues in Shakespear are carried on without any consciousness of what is to follow, without any appearance of preparation or premeditation. (‘Schlegel on the Drama’, xvi, 92) There again in that phrase ‘which we ourselves are to make’ is the essential innocence that pre-dates any form of knowingness, ‘preparation or premeditation’. The dramatic poet, Hazlitt concludes, is not one safely established person but splits himself disinterestedly – dialogically we might now say – into many persons. He thus possesses ‘the power of endowing the creatures of his imagination with such self-existent energy, that they afterwards act in each conjuncture according to general laws of nature: the poet institutes, as it were, experiments’ (xvi, 92). He does not already know the results which he himself will provide in the ensuing process. Thus for example, as David Bromwich puts it of the encounter with Poor Tom, ‘Is not Lear’s violent transposition of his own fate with Edgar’s a perfect instance of that “change of person” which according to Longinus outpaces the very mind
46 Philip Davis that makes it?’1 The example Longinus gives in chapter 27 of On the Sublime is taken from the Iliad: And with a far-echoing shout Hector cried out to the Trojans to rush against the ships and leave the blood-spattered spoils. And if I spy anyone who of his own will holds back from the ships, I will surely bring about his death.2 The conversion to the first person in that second sentence – instead of the reported speech of ‘Hector said that if he spied anyone’ – results from a sudden outburst of emotion, a leap of sympathy and imagination that immediately turns the external narrator into the character. That is how, in terms of such ‘outpacing’, Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action is central to all his later understanding of Shakespeare. For the Essay insists that the idea of the Self is just that – an idea, created in retrospect, further down the path of human evolution, as something slow and heavy. ‘We take the tablets of memory, reverse them, and stamp the image of self on that, which as yet possesses nothing but the name’ creating a future that is really the past’s (i, 41). But what happens in the midst of action is that we forget our ideas and must live our present not from memory of the past, but in instant creation of a possible future: ‘the imagination constantly outstripping the progress of time’ (i, 41). Then we find what we are in the very act of becoming it. That is why, for Hazlitt, Shakespeare has to be so fast and sudden in thought – the sheer pace of his thinking is set by its constantly seeking a verbal future for itself in order to stay alive. And Hazlitt means really alive and not just a continuing existence. Rather pessimistically, Hazlitt himself in his later essays tends to associate this dramatic power with youth – as compared with the narrowing consciousness of the later autobiographically recollected self (discussed in the essay ‘On Living to One’s-Self’).3 But it is more essentially to do with living in the dramatic immediacy of the present, at whatever age. Impatient of detailed interpretation, the mind in its excited heat goes for a meaning beyond the settlement of past knowledge, as if to snatch meaning out of a suddenly glimpsed future of unformulated possibility. A single phrase thus arrived at in Shakespeare ‘throws us back upon the past, forward into the future; brings every moment of our being or object of nature in startling review before us’ (‘On Poetry in General’, v, 5). Shakespeare’s imagination is rapid in its movement, like Ariel drinking the air before him – too fast for the more slowly explicit, prudential and self-centred thoughts that come only later in the development of man: [Imagination] unites the most opposite extremes; or, as Puck says, in boasting of his own feats, ‘puts a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes’. He seems always hurrying from his subject, even while describing it; but the stroke, like the lightning’s, is sure as it is sudden.
‘The future in the instant’ 47 He takes the widest possible range, but from that very range he has his choice of the greatest variety and aptitude of materials. He brings together images the most alike, but placed at the greatest distance from each other; that is, found in circumstances of the greatest dissimilitude. From the remoteness of his combinations, and the celerity with which they are effected, they coalesce the more indissolubly together. The more the thoughts are strangers to each other, and the longer they have been kept asunder, the more intimate does their union seem to become. (‘On Shakspeare and Milton’, v, 53–4) In such a world the fastness and the almost implosive fullness are interrelated: as it is said, even in as early a comedy as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the poet’s eye ‘doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven’. So too from earth to heaven ‘Lear calls on the Heavens to take his part, for “they are old like him”’. Or – to give a third example quoted by Hazlitt in ‘On Shakspeare and Milton’ from Troilus and Cressida – Ulysses urges Achilles to show himself in the field: No man is the lord of anything, Till he communicate his parts to others: Nor doth he of himself know them for aught, Till he behold them formed in the applause Where they’re extended! which like an arch reverberates The voice again, or like a gate of steel, Fronting the sun, receives and renders back Its figure and its heat. (v, 54) Achilles should not skulk self-interestedly in his tent. For here is a language of full and generous life instinctively opposed to the idea of self-containment and thus bursting out of it through complex similes. The imagination, says Hazlitt in the Essay, ‘must carry me out of myself into the feelings of others by one and the same process by which I am thrown forward as it were into my future being, and interested in it’ (i, 1–2). Achilles will find what he is, not by staying where he is, on his own and doing nothing, but by being taken out of himself – to action, into the future, and towards others. And the process by which Achilles must hurl himself forward is ‘one and the same’ as that by which, more widely, Shakespeare throws himself equally into the minds of all others in the play, even in their very opposition to each other. Again, what makes for the vitality of life here is, first, the quickness of mind, outpacing the preconceptions of its own identity, and then, the rich density of the material upon which that quickness finds itself employed – the diverse elements forged into new compounds of existence in the whiteheat of new creation.
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For in Shakespeare Hazlitt finds the human race’s most highly developed form of instantaneous disinterestedness in creative motion. There is nothing, no one, he cannot enter into becoming, verbally – passing ‘from one to another, like the same soul successively animating different bodies’ (v, 50). This, then, is how Hazlitt describes Shakespeare setting up his imaginative experiments – within a demanding space which is crowded both linguistically and physically: Within the circle of dramatic character and natural passion, each individual is to feel as keenly, as profoundly, as rapidly as possible, but he is not to feel beyond it, for others or for the whole. Each character, on the contrary, must be a kind of centre of repulsion to the rest; and it is their hostile interests, brought into collision, that must tug at their heartstrings, and call forth every faculty of thought, of speech, and action. They must not be represented like a set of profiles, looking all the same way, nor with their faces turned round to the audience; but in dire contention with each other: their words, like their swords, must strike fire from one another. (xviii, 305–6) In this vision, Shakespeare’s dramas are not a roomy place for easy, secondary social adjustments made by distinctly separate human characters, but experiments which, with each play, dramatically ‘call forth’ a primal social world that comes into being as if for the first time again. Within the tight space of the dramatic circle, as within the playwright himself, each character and each passion struggles for existence and fights for centrality. ‘One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail’ (Coriolanus 4.7.54). Hazlitt had learnt from Joseph Priestley that all matter existed – and the universe itself was held together – through the powers of attraction and repulsion, balancing each other out.4 It is not difficult to demonstrate how powerful an insight into Shakespeare is offered by Hazlitt’s sense of this experimental circle, held together even by the repulsions and collisions within it. In Antony and Cleopatra, for example, the soothsayer warns Antony that his genius simply cannot exist in close proximity to Octavius Caesar’s: therefore, he says, ‘make space enough between you’ (2.3.23). But, as Hazlitt knows, there is never space enough in Shakespeare: like nature according to Aristotle, Shakespeare abhors a vacuum. ‘But for vacancy,’ says Shakespeare, the air itself ‘had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too / And made a gap in nature’ (2.2.226–8). Thus the tense space in between Antony and Octavius becomes occupied by a person – Octavius’s sister Octavia is married off to Antony to try to cement their political alliance. But Octavia cannot make that space between them her own; rather, she is torn in two by it, half-sister, half-wife, ‘no midway / Twixt these extremes at all’ (3.4.20). She is like Viola entangled between Orsino and Olivia in Twelfth Night, or Isabella caught in the predicament
‘The future in the instant’ 49 between Angelo and Claudio in Measure for Measure. As the two profiles of Antony and Octavius face each other in conflict, Octavia is like the Grecian urn in the famous illusion that emerges between the profiles of two opposing faces, the impossible in-between space humanized and made painfully articulate.5 Moreover, in his account of Troilus and Cressida in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, Hazlitt gives further clues as to the nature of Shakespearean dramatic space as compared with Chaucer’s way. Chaucer’s mind, says Hazlitt, was consecutive, doing only one thing at a time, before passing on to another, in the riding rhyme of tales told in sequence along the road of pilgrimage to Canterbury. Where Shakespeare saw everything together and at once as by intuition – hence the dense interactive force of his metaphors – Chaucer’s ideas, says Hazlitt, were ‘kept separate, labelled’: ‘They did not play into one another’s hands. They did not re-act upon one another’ (iv, 226). In another of his rewrites of the great Essay on the Principles of Human Action in the Fragments of Lectures on Philosophy of 1812, the distinction between Chaucer and Shakespeare reappears as that between life as mere continuance and life as co-existence, respectively: Now, in coexisting things, one part may by means of this communication mutually act and be acted upon by others, but where the connexion is continued, or in successive identity of the individual, though what follows may depend intimately on what has gone before, that is, be acted upon it, it cannot react upon it. (ii, 233) Within the tightness of the dramatic circle, Shakespeare’s ideas, feelings, characters did act and re-act upon one another, in the very nature of drama as conflict by dialogue in the immediacy of the present. ‘Contradiction is half the battle in talking – the being startled by what others say, and having to answer on the spot’; ‘In conversation, as in other things, the action and reaction should bear a certain proportion to each other’ (xii, 40, 42). Nowhere is this dynamic clearer to Hazlitt than in Othello where he describes the ‘action and reaction’ of Othello and Iago upon one another as if increasingly they had become between them two inseparable parts of the self-same mind – the same action and reaction which Hazlitt detected in the strange symbiosis between the murderer Falkland and his accuser Williams in Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams: ‘The re-action and play of these two characters into each other’s hands (like Othello and Iago) is inimitably well managed, and on a par with any thing in the dramatic art’ (vi, 131). Except in this instance, however, Godwin’s ‘characters stand alone, self-created, and self-supported, without communication with, or reaction upon, any other … But this is not the nature of dramatic writing’ (xviii, 307–8). ‘The essence of the drama depends on the alternation and conflict of different passions’ (xvi, 408). Likewise Macbeth, says Hazlitt in Characters of
50 Philip Davis Shakespear’s Plays, is a play that works upon ‘a systematic principle of contrast’, in ‘a constant struggle between life and death’: Duncan and Macbeth, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Macbeth and Macduff (iv, 191). Fair is foul, foul is fair, everything floats upon a violent sea and moves this way and that: ‘every passion brings in its fellow-contrary’ (iv, 191). As the whole play begins to turn round upon Macbeth, and Birnam wood is come to Dunsinane, Hazlitt concludes: ‘The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them shall destroy the other’ (iv, 191). What Hazlitt sees Shakespeare doing, especially in the tragedies, is bringing together, under pressure of confined space, forces which cannot escape each other. ‘It is not’, writes Hazlitt, ‘a set speech or two, a preconcerted theory of a character, that will do this’: that would be what the Essay would describe as the language of the separate ego and of the opinionated past, alike in slow self-consciousness (‘On Poetry in General’, v, 48). Instead, more dynamically, ‘all the persons concerned must have been present in the poet’s imagination, as at a kind of rehearsal’ (‘On Shakespeare and Milton’, v, 48). To Hazlitt Shakespeare’s works are not set texts or finished productions, any more than our own identities are, but creations coming into being through rehearsals of themselves, trials of human nature. More like a rehearsal than a finished thing, the Shakespearean play is then, I repeat, a mental experiment in what above all claims Hazlitt’s interest – the transfer and interplay of primary life-energies and human passions, at a deep level prior to the settled formation of character and outcome: In Shakespeare there is a continual composition and decomposition of its elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinity or antipathy to other principles, which are brought in contact with it. Till the experiment is tried, we do not know the result, the turn which the character will take in its new circumstances. (‘On Shakspeare and Milton’, v, 51) Hazlitt’s language of action and reaction may well be taken from Newton’s third law of motion, but what in the mid-eighteenth century was a language of physics becomes increasingly in the early nineteenth century one of chemistry, process and becoming.6 This is for Hazlitt the Shakespearean dynamic, life in the making through forces of attraction and repulsion, affinity or antipathy thrown together in tense proximity: all the primary elements of life’s chemistry cast into the melting pot again. This is why Hazlitt thinks that Shakespeare is the poet truly imitative of nature, because it is as though his language is not merely descriptive but a kind of poetic science or natural philosophy that has keyed into the secret underlying language of creation itself. Here then is the ‘original text’ of life rather than a second-hand description – the underlying score or map or template or dynamic of creation; what we might call the physical or chemical
‘The future in the instant’ 51 or biological DNA of the universal life-principle. That is why a Shakespearean play seems fundamentally so full of life to Hazlitt. It is not mere life-likeness or liveliness or anything that can retain the same vitality in a paraphrase: it is as if everything is being created in life as though for the first time again, every faculty of thought, of speech, of character and action called into being in extremis by forces of both need and opposition. Shakespeare is, in this, Hazlitt’s version of Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809).7 But the spirit of the enterprise was already expressed well enough by Lord Kames: Thus between a passion and its object there is a natural operation, resembling action and reaction in physics: a passion acting upon its object, magnifies it greatly in appearance; and this magnified-object reacting upon the passions, swells and inflames it mightily.8 This is how the very density of the human world is created. Yet perhaps the deepest analogue lies for Hazlitt in Coleridge, where in Aids to Reflection Coleridge argues that ‘no Natural thing or act can be called originant’.9 He says of the word ‘origin, original or originant’: the reader cannot too early be warned that it is not applicable, and, without abuse of language, can never be applied, to a mere link in a chain of effects, where each, indeed, stands in the relation of a cause to those that follow, but is at the same time the effect of all that precede. For in these cases a cause amounts to little more than an antecedent. At the most it means only a conductor of the causative influence.10 The language of calculation, of separate cause and effect, is a human falsification – similar to our division of time into three separate parts called past, present and future. Rather, there is process and interchange. As Coleridge goes on to add in an important footnote: Thus we may say of a River that it originates in such or such a fountain; but the water of a Canal is derived from such or such a River. The Power which we call Nature, may be thus defined: A Power subject to the Law of Continuity … which law the human understanding, by a necessity arising out of its own constitution, can conceive only under the form of Cause and Effect … This becomes evident as soon as we attempt to apply the pre-conception directly to any operation of Nature. For in this case we are forced to represent the cause as being at the same instant the effect, and vice versa the effect as being the cause – a relation which we seek to express by the terms Action and Re-action; but for which the term Reciprocal Action or the law of Reciprocity (germanice Wechselwirkung) would be both more accurate and more expressive.11
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Humans normally have to try to work things out by ‘preconception’; but Nature works in faster and less separate terms, one thing becoming ‘at the same instant’ another. It is because there is insufficient time or space for separateness in Nature that there must be a social reciprocity.12 For Coleridge was an enthusiast for a book by Andrew Baxter published in 1733 under the title An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul, where Baxter describes a struggling world in which ‘each agent must suffer in acting and act in suffering’.13 Such ideas are central, of course, to Coleridge’s thinking in chapter 7 of Biographia Literaria (1817) where he says that it is in the world of mind as it is in the world of physics – namely: In every voluntary movement we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail ourselves of it. It must exist, that there may be a something to be counteracted, and which by its re-action, aids the force that is exerted to resist it.14 It is that intermixture of yielding and resistance, of passive and active motion that describes the ‘intermediate faculty’ in human beings which he goes on to call ‘Imagination’. For Imagination is the faculty which means we are not mentally tied to replicating the sequence of past associations, but can rework them in new combinations, and thus change the very order of things. As Hazlitt himself says in the Essay, It is of the very nature of the imagination to change the order in which things have been impressed on the senses, and to connect the same properties with different objects, and different properties with the same objects; to combine our original impressions in all possible forms, and to modify these impressions themselves to a very great degree. (i, 27) Without this, concludes Hazlitt, man ‘would not be a rational agent’ (i, 27). Thus what Shakespearean drama does for Hazlitt is immerse him in a dense medium of reciprocity, of action and reaction, wherein absolute freedom of self or agency is impossible, because everything is a ‘link’, nothing an ‘origin’. And yet, even so, such drama is the testing-ground of such human freedom as there may still be. As his 1812 lecture ‘On Liberty and Necessity’ makes clear, there is no unconditional freedom, self-starting, and utterly independent. No agent acts without suffering. To Hazlitt, we are mainly either transmitters, merely passing on the pressures around us; or reactors who, as the external pressures bear in upon us, rather than merely receiving or continuing their force, employ such inner resources as those pressures call forth, in order to modify them. In the great Shakespearean experiment, then, Octavia is no more than a pained transmitter – or what Coleridge calls ‘a conductor’ – of all that exists between her brother and her husband. Or again, when in Romeo and Juliet the
‘The future in the instant’ 53 Nurse says to Juliet that Romeo banished is no more good to her than Romeo dead, and that she should therefore turn to Paris instead, then the Nurse is only transmitting the world’s pressures and as such is only a calculator, not a real person of her own. But in the action and reaction that goes on between the Nurse and Juliet, Hazlitt sees the youthful heroine in the process of finding it in herself to become such a person, by dint of contrast: Thus when Juliet has by her complaints encouraged the Nurse to say, ‘Shame come to Romeo,’ she instantly repels the wish, which she had herself occasioned, by answering – ’Blister’d be thy tongue / For such a wish … Nurse: Will you speak well of him that kill’d your cousin? Juliet. Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband? (iv, 255–6) Notice, it is the word ‘instantly’ that describes the moment of instinctive counteraction: the word of speed is the word of sudden sympathy, of imaginative love and painful disinterestedness. But for Hazlitt, it is above all Cordelia who finds in herself ‘instantly’ again the power to be more than a conductor, offering something other in the very midst of reaction. He quotes the words of the ruined father reviving from his madness: Do not laugh at me, For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia. (‘Lear’, iv, 269) What is Cordelia to reply? It is a split second in which she emotionally receives the whole weight of his life. At such extreme moments, says Hazlitt, ‘The whole of our existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits, of that which we desire and that which we dread, is brought before us by contrast’ (‘On Poetry in General’, v, 6). The future will be formed by her reply. This is the experiment then: there are no rules now set out artificially in advance, for we know there are daughters in Lear who could ‘laugh at [him], mock [him]’ when he says, ‘For as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia’. ‘Till the experiment is tried, we do not know the result, the turn which the character will take in its new circumstances’ (v, 51). But Cordelia responds with this in turn: ‘And so I am: I am’. Then, as Hazlitt says, ‘the action and re-action are equal; the keenness of immediate suffering only gives us a more intense aspiration after, and a more intimate participation with the antagonist world of good’ (v, 6). Thus, the
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very pain of Lear brings out more of sheer life of those who bear witness, in their attempt to bear, or oppose or comfort it. ‘And so I am: I am’. The repetition is the final settling of her character, of what ‘I am’ crystallizing itself out of solution. It is Longinus’s sublime ‘change of person’. For suddenly in the momentary tight space between one speech and the need to reply and react, passion fills the potential breach – a world of compressed time bursting emotionally into confined space, with all the force of life itself: Tragic poetry … in the rapid whirl of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest contemplations on human life. When Lear says of Edgar, ‘Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this’ … his sorrow, like a flood, supplies the sources of all other sorrow … In like manner, the ‘So I am’ of Cordelia gushes from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it of a weight of love and of supposed ingratitude, which has pressed upon it for years. (v, 5) This is why Hazlitt is so interested in emotion, in passion – in whatever tacit power can be wrenched out of being passively affected by the imposing world.15 ‘It is from the excess of passion’ that Shakespeare himself ‘must borrow the activity of his imagination’, not just transmitting the pressure but transforming it by a species of re-action (xviii, 306). Nothing is more important to Hazlitt than that distinctly human shift from passive to active, from mechanical to dynamic, from imprisonment within life’s knock-on sequence to a radical change of life’s shape, created by the re-action of imagination. It is the means by which human beings become the creators as well as the creations of their age.16 In the history of the evolution of human thought, the Romantics claimed the existence of ‘Shakespearean thinking’: Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action is, I conclude, one of the forms of translation by which that way of thinking remained alive and vital in the nineteenth century. Carlyle’s great essay ‘Characteristics’ (1831) was another later version, in both its distinction between mechanical and dynamical forms of thought and its insistence that ideas of self produce a false consciousness that substitutes itself for the reality of living. And behind both Hazlitt and Carlyle of course lie Coleridge and the influence of German idealism.17 But F.W.H. Myers’s great late-Victorian work Human Personality, posthumously published in 1903, serves to make the larger point here. For in that book Myers speaks of certain powers that – because they were not immediately necessary to mere utilitarian survival – remained stored and latent below the level of everyday evolved consciousness. These he called ‘subliminal’ powers, lying in wait below the limen or threshold of consciousness. They are the powers that genius taps into, in particular in the realms of discovery and of art. And what we call art is one of the great reminders of those half-lost or half-forgotten powers – precisely because it says that at
‘The future in the instant’ 55 some fundamental level, outside as well as inside art, we are more creative as human beings than we often consciously think. In this way, Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action serves as one of those great reminders – that we are not necessarily what we have told ourselves we are; that in the moment of action we are in our primary biological make-up more innocent, more emotionally dynamic, and less calculating than we recall. For at its most releasing, action is not first of all merely practical or routine: it is creative, imaginative, new, extempore, and dramatic. It is in the same spirit that the great theatre director, Peter Brook speaks, when he says, ‘We are constantly betraying reality, which we don’t succeed in perceiving, grasping and living, and we’re continually diminishing and reducing it. … It’s always a highly diminished view of the present moment as it might be’.18 But, says Brook, the artist’s vision offers: a greater possibility of seeing what is actually happening than the duller vision with which we live our everyday lives. … The human faculty for apprehension is not static, but is a second-for-second redefining of what it sees. Look at those visual conundrums where you don’t know if something is upside down – you know, black and white squares that seem to be jumping inside out. You can actually see how the mind copes with something which it is trying to understand. … Now to me the total works of Shakespeare are like a very, very complete set of codes and these codes, cipher for cipher, set off in us, stir in us, vibrations and impulses which we immediately try to make coherent and understandable. If we enter wholeheartedly into this relation then all the steps of understanding and reincarnating are steps towards making a world in the present tense, in the present moment.19 To provide just such a re-education – in what we do, in praxis, and not just what we think or say we do in abstract – is the great half-contradictory task involved in the very fight against false forms of educated consciousness. For how far the dynamic of imaginative action rediscovered in the Essay and exemplified in Shakespeare can live on in the later age not only of an individual but of a culture is what is at stake here. With regard to the work of Shakespeare, Peter Brook proceeds from ‘an absolute conviction that this is the greatest school of living that we know’.20 I want to suggest that Hazlitt’s Essay should be used, with Shakespeare, in just such a ‘school for living’: that is, as part of an education in the action of creative thinking.
4
Hazlitt and the Selfishness of Passion John Whale
Hazlitt is fascinated throughout his career by the many forms of selfishness and prejudice in his contemporary society. His specific focus in numerous essays on selfishness, which derives from prejudice, partisanship and passion, constitutes a major exploration of one of the key concerns of his Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805). Here Hazlitt attempted to establish the possibility of a moral imagination which enabled him to defend human action from utilitarian claims of its essential selfishness. This would later be developed, particularly in his aesthetic writings on literature and the fine arts, into his own specific version of the sympathetic imagination. The question of passion’s selfishness features strongly in Hazlitt’s writing long before the publication of Liber Amoris in 1823. His major achievement in his Essay on the Principles of Human Action is his refutation of the utilitarian argument that the mind is essentially selfish. His response to his opponents is to turn the idea of selfishness on its head. He confirms the individual’s basis in selfinterest, but by referring to the way in which the self has to see itself into the future, he short-circuits selfishness and turns it into a form of benevolence, or, at least, disinterestedness. Any self-projecting into the future must contemplate a self not yet in existence and can do so only through recourse to that agent of sympathetic projection, the imagination. Looking at oneself in the future, Hazlitt argues, is equivalent – as an act of sympathetic knowledge – to a disinterested consideration of another being. While one might rightly celebrate the ingenuity of Hazlitt’s argument here (his undermining of the utilitarian argument from within), his strategy also constitutes a potential fragmentation or at least discontinuity of the self at the same time as it argues for the moral schema of that self. This brand of philosophically conceived, inevitable disinterestedness, as compared to the more familiar disinterestedness of Matthew Arnold, is a formulation which admirably suits Hazlitt’s own constitution as a passionate radical: a man who can revel in heated argument, even appreciate the pleasure of hating and the fierce commitment of partisanship alongside the capacity for imaginative sympathy.1 My concern in this chapter is not so much with this central manoeuvre in the argument of Hazlitt’s most sustained philosophical work, but with a
Hazlitt and the selfishness of passion 57 topic which, as I shall argue, haunts this claim of disinterestedness and which could be seen as challenging the practical working out of Hazlitt’s philosophical position: what might variously be termed romantic love or sexual passion. As we shall see, Hazlitt’s attitude to sexual passion lies at the heart of his definition of the principles of human action and forms a disturbing and extended commentary in his Reply to Malthus published two years later in 1807. It is a topic to which he returns throughout his career as a writer and one which culminates in Liber Amoris. Hazlitt’s writings contain a sustained examination of sexual passion in which he explores the relationship between sex and social improvement, the role played by literature in the production of romance, and the disjunction between the realm of writing and the reality of actual sexual encounter. At the heart of his argument in The Principles of Human Action Hazlitt acknowledges the exceptional nature of sexual passion. Its nature and significance – even if represented as the ungovernable appetite of the rapidly expanding lower orders – plays a central role in Malthus’s arguments about population. It is no surprise therefore that it should have to figure in Hazlitt’s riposte. Sexual appetite constitutes a major challenge to the book’s central argument in support of the natural disinterestedness of the human mind. There is, according to Hazlitt, but one instance in which appetite hangs about a man as a perpetual clog and dead-weight upon the reason, namely the sexual appetite, and that here the selfish habit produced by this constant state of animal sensibility seems to have a direct counterpoise given to it by nature in the mutual sympathy of the sexes. (i, 46) Even in this early stage of his argument about sexual appetite, Hazlitt is keen to see it ‘contained’ by a nature which gives it a ‘direction’; and he confidently contends that it is based on ‘mutual sympathy’. Mere bodily appetite is here already mediated by the potentially more altruistic passion of sympathy and sexual relations are accorded a natural mutuality. These are the key terms of Hazlitt’s view of sexual passion: its reciprocity and its susceptibility, its necessary subordination, to the higher mediating powers of mind, affection, and imagination. As Hazlitt’s argument on this point progresses, it also becomes clear that sexual appetite’s subordination comes about through a consideration of the self in time. The continued and pertinacious nature of passion – seen narratively as the ‘pursuit of an object’ – means that other and higher aspects are necessarily involved: It is plain with respect to one of our appetites, I mean the sexual, where the gratification of the same passion in another is the means of gratifying our own, that our physical sensibility stimulates our sympathy with the desires of the other sex, and on the other hand this feeling of
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John Whale mutual sympathy increases the physical desires of both. This is indeed the chief foundation of the sexual passion, though I believe that it’s immediate and determining cause depends upon other principles not to be here lightly touched on. It would be easy to shew from many things that mere appetite (generally at least in reasonable beings) is but the fragment of a self-moving machine, but a sort of half-organ, a subordinate instrument even in the accomplishment of it’s own purposes; that it does little or nothing without the aid of another faculty to inform and direct it. There are several striking examples of this given by Rousseau in relating the progress of his own passions. … Before the impulses of appetite can be converted into the regular pursuit of a given object, they must first be communicated to the understanding, and modify the will through that. Consequently as the desire of the ultimate gratification of the appetite is not the same with the appetite itself, that is mere physical uneasiness, but an indirect result of its communication to the thinking or imaginative principle, the influence of appetite over the will must depend on the extraordinary degree of force and vividness which it gives to the idea of a particular object; and accordingly we find that the same cause, which irritates the desire of selfish gratification, increases our sensibility to the same desires and gratification in others, where they are consistent with our own, and where the violence of the physical impulse does not overpower every other consideration. (i, 44–5)
In this passage there is a pleasing circularity as the subordination and mediation of passion returns to the question of reciprocity. Quite conveniently, even the irritated ‘desire of selfish gratification’ leads the self to an immediate increase in the awareness of the same feeling in others, though at least here Hazlitt is clearly aware of the more dangerous possibility of this violent passion overwhelming all other considerations. Hazlitt’s rebuttal of what he sees as the primary Malthusian and utilitarian claim for the selfishness of sexual appetite now takes the characteristic form of an expansion of the idea of the self. By widening his argument to include other forms of pleasure and addiction, Hazlitt turns the case for selfishness on its head: if selfishness leads to self-destruction, it cannot be self-interested and its inclusion of sympathy and the involvement of others confirms its favourable inclination towards altruism and sociality: The question which I have proposed to examine is whether there is any general principle of selfishness in the human mind, or whether it is not naturally disinterested. Now the effects of appetite are so far from being any confirmation of the first supposition, that we are even oftener betrayed by them into actions contrary to our own well-known, clear, and lasting interest than into those which are injurious to others. The ‘short-lived pleasure’ and the ‘lasting woe’ fall to the lot of the same
Hazlitt and the selfishness of passion 59 being. – I will give one more example and then have done. A man addicted to the pleasures of the bottle is less able to govern this propensity after drinking a certain quantity and feeling the actual pleasure and state of excitement which it produces, than he is to abstain entirely from it’s indulgence. When once the liquor gets into his head, to use the common phrase, the force which it gives to his predominant feeling gets the better of every other idea, and he from that time loses all power of self-control. Both before, and after this, however, the same feeling of actual excitement, which urges him on, makes him enter more cordially into the convivial dispositions of his companions, and a man is always earnest that others should drink as he becomes unwilling to desist himself. (i, 45–6) As with the central argument of the Essay, Hazlitt’s account of sexual passion expands its appreciation of the self to include the self in time and by so doing reverses the categories. If in the general case against selfishness Hazlitt might be said to duplicate identity by claiming that one’s self in the future is equivalent to another person, here he relies upon the destruction of the self to support his claim of its natural and inherent unselfishness. Despite his attention to ‘continued consciousness’, Hazlitt’s disinterested self depends upon self-sacrifice. After his concerted attack in the Essay, Hazlitt returned very quickly to the vexed subject of sexual appetite in the final letter of his Reply to Malthus’s Essay on Population (1807) entitled ‘Whether Vice and Misery are the Necessary Consequences of, and the Only Checks to, the Principle of Population’. His initial concern here focuses on the way in which Malthus equates hunger and ‘passion between the sexes’, an equation which makes the sexual passion ‘necessary’ and constant. Much of his effort in the following pages is taken up with an attempt to undermine this proposition by reference to historical and cultural differences. Institutions, manners, history and geography are adduced by Hazlitt to undermine Malthus’s abiding and mechanical principle which, he argues, ‘rests on a malicious supposition, that all mankind … are like so many animals in season’ (i, 236). His critique focuses intently therefore on the culturally constructed nature of sexuality and is motivated by an optimistic belief in the power of social improvement. This in turn leads him to attack the class basis of Malthus’s argument which is focused on the ‘vice and misery’ of the lower orders. Hazlitt’s riposte is to muster a familiar attack on luxury as the debased producer of a licentious culture which promotes social injustice and the unequal distribution of wealth. The end of the letter addresses itself in complex and seemingly contradictory ways to his contemporary society’s promotion of a highly sexualized culture. Having argued against Malthus’s natural necessity and having taken him to task for his inequitable and licentious promotion of luxury, Hazlitt
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suddenly turns on himself and his often disappointed experience of romantic love: I never fell in love but once; and then it was with a girl who always wore her handkerchief pinned tight round her neck, with a fair face, gentle eyes, a soft smile, and cool auburn locks. I mention this, because it may in some measure account for my temperate, tractable notions of this passion, compared with Mr Malthus’s. It was not a raging heat, a fever in the veins: but it was like a vision, a dream, like thoughts of childhood, an everlasting hope, a distant joy, a heaven, a world that might be. The dream is still left, and sometimes comes confusedly over me in solitude and silence, and mingles with the softness of the sky, and veils my eyes from mortal grossness. After all, Mr. Malthus may be right in his opinion of human nature. Though my notions of love have been thus aerial and refined, I do not know that this was any advantage to me, or that I might not have done better with a few of our author’s ungovernable transports, and sensual oozings. Perhaps the workings of the heart are best expressed by a gloating countenance, by mawkish sentiments and lively gestures. Cupid often perches on broad shoulders, or on the brawny calf of a leg, a settlement is better than a love-letter, and in love not minds, but bodies and fortunes meet. I have therefore half a mind to retract all that I have said, and prove to Mr. Malthus that love is not even so intellectual a passion as he sometimes admits it to be, but altogether gross and corporal. (i, 283) ‘Advantage’ and ‘done better’ here speak as much of sexual conquest as of a general state of happiness or contentment. In such a passage, Hazlitt begins to articulate his sexual frustration at the want of efficacy in the language of literary romance in sexual encounters and, at the same time, creates an unhappy schism between aesthetic romance and the corporeality of sex: between, as he puts it, the ‘aerial’ and ‘the brawny calf of a leg’. Hazlitt’s wistful and ironized admission made under pressure of his own rather forlorn career in love, that he has ‘half a mind’ to give in to Malthus’s argument comes as something of a surprise. The end of the letter (and of the book as a whole) turns into a rather fractured response to his own agonized experience of sexual morality. Malthus’s principle of necessity leads Hazlitt to a rueful consideration of a position in which sexual mores might be freed from the restrictions of the moralists and the pain of a self-lacerating conscience. In two articles on ‘Mind and Motive’, published in the Examiner in April 1815, Hazlitt’s concern is also to expose what he sees as the pernicious and overly simplistic ideology of utility, referred to disparagingly here as ‘the prevailing doctrine of modern systems of morals and metaphysics, that man is purely a sensual and selfish animal, governed solely by a regard either to
Hazlitt and the selfishness of passion 61 his immediate gratification or future interest’ a doctrine, he immediately informs us, which ‘we mean to oppose with all our might, whenever we meet with it’ (xx, 44). To this end, he argues that the complicated nature of ‘our lives’ derives from our being: the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Rousseau, in his Emilius, proposed to educate a perfectly reasonable man, who was to have passions and affections like other men, but with an absolute controul over them. He was to love and to be wise. This is a contradiction in terms. (xx, 43) Continuing with his observation that ‘the frame of our minds, like that of our bodies, is exceedingly complicated’, he goes on to illustrate, in addition to the expected behavioural aspects of imagination and sensibility, the dynamic nature of excitement, and ‘the power of fascination’ (xx, 44, 45). Disgust, grief and fear are also adduced to the main argument of the mind’s complication and the multiplicity of its motives, all with the clear purpose of proving the dangerous simplicity of the utilitarian doctrine that ‘the love of happiness is considered as the only spring of human conduct and desires’ (xx, 47). Hazlitt’s cataloguing of an alternative set of human motives certainly does complicate the issue as far as his own subscription to the power of love is concerned. Here he sides with its absurdity, fantasy and dangerously delusive capacity in order to deny the spectre of utility. The human, particularly where love is concerned, is marked by a behavioural dynamic dangerously out of touch not only with self-interest, but also with self-preservation. The mark of the human here is clearly divorced from a rational economy of interest. The mind is beset with superstitious fears, imaginary cares, and desirous fantasies. Once again, in proving his point that human beings are not, at root, self-interested creatures, Hazlitt makes them dangerously irrational ones. The dangers of sexual passion, evident here and in his two early antiutilitarian works, recur in Hazlitt’s writings at significant moments throughout his career. Where his cherished belief in romantic love is threatened or severely challenged, the spectre of utilitarian sexual appetite resurfaces with devastating consequences. At such moments, Hazlitt turns spectacularly on the literary culture which surrounds and constructs him. Here he turns the cynical lens upon himself in an excoriating attack upon the nature of the man of letters. One such resurfacing occurs in a notorious passage of his Examiner article on ‘Mr Kean’s Iago’, omitted from the version which appeared in A View of the English Stage. Here Hazlitt offers a rather worrying and unedifying representation of the nature of sexual passion. He refers to Iago as a ‘most learned and irrefragable doctor on the subject of love’ for his cynical view as to the basis of Desdemona’s passion for Othello: his denial that it lies in ‘[Othello’s]
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virtues and his valiant parts’ (Othello, 1.3.254–5) and his confirmation of it being ‘merely a lust of the blood, and a permission of the will’ (Othello, 1.3.339 [xx, 401]). (Interestingly, it was Malthus who was equated with Iago by Hazlitt in 1807.) This leads to a more general denial of the possibility of the sexual passion being attached to a culture of refinement and the exalted state of our souls which Hazlitt had urged so strenuously in his Reply to Malthus. The idea that love has its source in moral or intellectual excellence, in good nature or good sense, or has any connection with sentiment or refinement of any kind, is one of those preposterous and wilful errors, which ought to be extirpated for the sake of those few persons who alone are likely to suffer by it, whose romantic generosity and delicacy ought not to be sacrificed to the baseness of their nature; but who treading securely the flowery path, marked out for them by poets and moralists, the licensed artificers of fraud and lies, are dashed to pieces down the precipice, and perish without help. (xx, 401) This embittered outcry against literary culture and its suggestion of martyrdom as a result of the way in which the aesthetic masks the reality of sexual passion articulates the axis on which Liber Amoris operates. In this highly contentious text, Hazlitt offers his readers an opportunity to explore the selfishness of passion in a self-lacerating and autobiographical form. Here the capacity of imagination to transform the self, to move beyond the self-preserving aspects of ego, meets head-on with the selfishness of sexual obsession; the liberation of fantasy posed against agonized selfdestruction. As an anatomy of romance rather than a documentary autobiography, Liber Amoris might be read as Hazlitt’s most extraordinary and daring response to a question of personal ethics which he had first approached as a relatively young man in his treatise of 1805. But, ever since its publication in 1823, the meaning and motivation of Liber Amoris has been a bone of contention among readers and critics, particularly as to whether its function is cathartic, ironic, or celebratory.2 It is struck between a demonstration of the pathological and a celebration of the ennobling power of romantic love. As a contemporary reworking of the Pygmalion and Galatea story, it could be seen to demonstrate the failure of metamorphosis in its heroine ‘S’ and to glory in the transformation of its jilted male protagonist ‘H’. Though it asks us to celebrate the transformation of H through the power of love, it also forces us to witness his ignominious unmanning at the hands of treacherous femininity. Its problem of reciprocity – H’s passion unreturned by S – was one which Hazlitt was also to consider in his thoughts on the ‘Nature of Love and Self Love’ in Common Places LXV: If a man were refused by a woman a thousand times, and he really loved her, he would still think that at the bottom of her heart she preferred
Hazlitt and the selfishness of passion 63 him to every one else. Nor is this wonderful, when we consider that all passion is a species of madness; and that the feeling in the mind towards the beloved object is the most amiable and delightful thing in the world. Our love to her is heavenly, and so (the heart whispers us) must hers be to us – though it were buried at the bottom of the sea; nay, from the tomb our self-love would revive it! (xx, 133) In this instance, at least, Hazlitt feels comfortable about combining the mad and the heavenly, though we might feel worried about the ease with which he equates the ‘amiable’ with the ‘delightful’. Certainly, it provides stark evidence for the power of self-love at the heart of Hazlitt’s conception of romantic passion and reinforces the way in which, in Liber Amoris, the supposedly exalting and refining process of being in love might, at the same time, constitute a form of madness or delusion. The disjunction between literary romance and corporeality is also a major part of Hazlitt’s text. Significant attention has rightly been paid to the exchange and shattering of the bronze figurine of Napoleon at the heart of Liber Amoris, at once signifying the breakdown of self, masculine identity and political idealism. Less attention has been paid to the exchange and return of three volumes of H’s own writings which might be said to signal his rather insecure sense of being an author. S’s response to these three volumes provides one of the final agonizing twists in the ‘plot’ of Liber Amoris. H offers The Vicar of Wakefield, The Man of Feeling, and Nature and Art (a particularly charged threesome in the circumstances) in exchange for the safe return of his own books, explaining that: ‘I was piqued, in fact, that she should have these to shew as proofs of my weakness, and as if I thought the way to win her was by plaguing her with my own performances’ (ix, 148). When S’s seemingly mischievous sister informs him ‘and those are the ones that she prizes the most!’ he is immediately renewed and transformed with hope (ix, 149). It is, of course, dashed only a short time later. Such brittleness and insecurity haunts Hazlitt’s own identity as writer, particularly in the conjunction, as here, of his standing as a professional and the potency of his sexual life. His most explicit response to this is to be found in ‘A Letter to My Son’ – a text which functions as an illuminating supplement to Liber Amoris. Hazlitt’s letter begins with sensible and principled advice to young William Junior who is provided with suggestions as to how to moderate his conduct to allow for a liberal and sympathetic treatment of others and to ensure his own happiness by making him less singular and at odds with the world. There is a pragmatism at work here which concedes the differences and disappointments of a rank-based society while keeping alive a democratic sense of equality based on candour. Young William, as befits the son of a self-respecting liberal, is told to ‘hope for the best’ and to operate according to the dictum that: ‘True equality is the only true morality or true
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wisdom’.3 Only when the advice moves to the difficult business of courtship does the principled equanimity begin to collapse. At this point, the letter begins to draw a sharp line between realism and idealism. The father’s advice now begins to metamorphose into a bitter critique of the nature of romance and the figure of the professional man of letters. The change begins with Hazlitt warning his son against the physically debilitating effect of books: Another thing I would caution you against is not to pore over your books till you are bent almost double – a habit you will never be able to get the better of, and which you will find of serious ill consequence. A stoop in the shoulders sinks a man in public and in private estimation.4 This is soon followed by the more personal revelation that ‘I applied too close to my studies, soon after I was of your age, and hurt myself irreparably by it’.5 What appears to be no more than sensible advice about a healthy lifestyle which pays due attention to the body now begins to take on more loaded significance. As the letter progresses it develops into an agonized self-portrait of ruined masculinity. Hazlitt goes on to declare that ‘scholastic study’ ‘unfits men for active life’ and this prepares the ground for a more devastating consideration of categories: The ideal is always at variance with the practical. The habit of fixing the attention on the imaginary and abstracted deprives the mind equally of energy and fortitude. By indulging our imaginations on fictions and chimeras, where we have it all our own way and are led on only by the pleasure of the prospect, we grow fastidious, effeminate, lapped in idle luxury, impatient of contradictions, and unable to sustain the shock of real diversity, when it comes; as by being taken up with abstract reasoning or remote events in which we are merely passive spectators, we have no resources to provide against it, no readiness, or expedients for the occasion, or spirit to use them, even if they occur.6 Not only has book-reading led to a physical degeneration capable of rendering the figure of the author unfit for love, it has also deluded him by concocting an idealized and unattainable fiction of romance. Hazlitt even refers to it pathologically as ‘this theoretical mania’ produced by ‘the dreams of poets and moralists (who both treat of things as they ought to be and not as they are)’.7 His son is warned against reading real women as if they are the creatures of romance and against situating himself as a ‘Tom Jones, Lovelace or St. Preux’; the danger of interpreting love along fictional lines is forcefully captured in the father’s next injunction: ‘Avoid this error as you would shrink back from a precipice’.8 Hazlitt’s agonized revision of romance deals in actual horror and self-destruction rather than aesthetically mediated sublimity. His next confident assertion revealingly speaks of its connection
Hazlitt and the selfishness of passion 65 with recent events in his own private life, not least in its deployment of the Pygmalion metaphor on which Liber Amoris centres: ‘All your fine sentiments and romantic notions will (of themselves) make no more impression on one of these delicate creatures, than on a piece of marble’.9 From this point, the letter degenerates into a severe critique of what Hazlitt sees as the reality of woman. ‘Love in women’, he argues, ‘is a merely selfish passion’.10 They ‘care nothing about poets, or philosophers, or politicians. They go by a man’s looks and manner’.11 Women it is clear, as far as Hazlitt is concerned, inhabit a realm of physical appearance and biological sexual impulse which, disillusioned, he now proclaims to be the true reality of ‘love’. With a determined sense of bitter disappointment he is forced to concede that: ‘the natural and instinctive passion of love is excited by qualities not peculiar to artists, authors, and men of letters’.12 There follows a portrait of the artist as a physical ruin which must have made a big impression on his twelve-yearold son: Authors … feel nothing spontaneously … Nothing stirs their blood or accelerates their juices or tickles their veins. Instead of yielding to the first natural and lively impulse of things, in which they would find sympathy, they screw themselves up to some far-fetched view of the subject in order to be unintelligible. Realities are not good enough for them, till they undergo the process of imagination and reflection … But their faculty for thinking must be set in motion, before you can put any soul into them. They are intellectual dram-drinkers; and without their necessary stimulus, are torpid, dead, insensible to every thing. They have great life of mind, but none of body. They do not drift with the stream of company or of passing occurrences, but are straining at some hyperbole or striking out a bye-path of their own. Follow them who list. Their minds are a sort of Herculaneum, full of old, petrified images; – are set in stereotype, and little fitted to the ordinary occasions of life.13 Hazlitt’s turning against his own profession, indeed one might say, against himself here, provides an interesting inversion of portraits of the artist as a man of sensibility. It returns masculinity to the vigorous body and empirical sense perception. In offering a warning to his son (and indirectly telling the story of his own downfall) Hazlitt puts masculinity back in touch with itself, even if that means that love or passion is now a case of ‘juices’ and ‘tickle[d] “veins”’. The reality acceded to because of the abiding nature of women’s selfish love short-circuits culture and returns the self to the realm of common nature operating at the level of animal instincts. As a result, the gap between literary love and actual physical passion is conceived of as constituting a mockery of truth in which the masculine self has been duped and undone. Even though the letter ends on a more optimistic note with the proud father relishing the possibility of his son
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becoming a painter, the epistle never quite recovers from its all too candid portrait of a romantically ruined father. As with his embittered reading of Othello which endorses Iago’s sexual cynicism at the expense of Desdemona, Hazlitt’s letter to his son bifurcates passion along gendered lines. That it does so in such crude terms is less surprising than the way it locates truth in relation to the division. In such texts, Hazlitt, ostensibly at least, accords the realm of physical appetite and appearances all the power of reality. The realm of the literary and of the aesthetic more generally is considered to be no more than a mockery, a cheat aimed at those most susceptible to forms of refinement and idealization. As a consequence, the narrative of the disappointed male lover takes the form of a paranoid conspiracy. Though clearly issuing from an experience of heartfelt crisis and the most personal of disappointments, Hazlitt’s commentaries on the nature of passion form a concerted and repeated argument within the body of his writings and one which most severely challenges his cherished beliefs in the power of the imagination and the efficacy of the aesthetic. They even provide us with moments at which, as we have seen, he seems willing to concede to his most hated adversaries. Passion pushes Hazlitt to the very depths of what he conceives of as the utilitarian nightmare: man is simply an ignoble beast at the mercy of mere appetite and all the promises of an exalted, refined, and improved nature are no more than a cruel hoax which mocks our misguided aspirations. When, in his essay ‘On Great and Little Things’, Hazlitt expresses a penchant for labouring-class women rather than fashionable beauties – preference, as he puts it, for the ‘Pamelas and Fannys of Richardson and Fielding’ who make his ‘blood tingle’ over the ‘Clementinas and Clarissas’ whom he admires from a distance, he then begins another attack on the literary, this time focused on ‘bluestockings’ (viii, 236). The logic of Hazlitt’s passion here is to strip sexual passion down to its bare essentials, to remove the superstructure of literary culture and its mediating refinement of romance so as to expose the male self in all its raw isolation. In so doing, he jettisons the improving culture which he argued so passionately for against Malthus’s principle of population: I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means. If I know that she has read any thing I have written, I cut her acquaintance immediately. This sort of literary intercourse with me passes for nothing. Her critical and scientific acquirements are carrying coals to Newcastle. I do not want to be told that I have published such or such a work. I knew all this before. It makes no addition to my sense of power. I do not wish the affair to be brought about in that way. I would have her read my soul: she should understand the language of the heart: she should know what I am, as if she were another self! She should love me for myself alone. I like myself without any reason: I would have her do so too. (viii, 236)
Hazlitt and the selfishness of passion 67 The renunciation continues as he reflects on his own disappointed love affairs. His disgust and shame throw him back on himself. ‘I seemed a species by myself’, he writes, at once reinforcing his aggressively male isolation (viii, 237). The re-establishment of his self-esteem takes the form of a gendered split between women and the world of books, that problematical axis which, as we have seen, haunts his concerted attempts to understand the nature of selfish passion: ‘The only thing I ever piqued myself upon was the writing the Essay on the Principles of Human Action, – a work that no woman ever read, or would ever comprehend the meaning of’ (viii, 237).
5
Hazlitt and the ‘Kings of Speech’ Paul Hamilton
Jacobin philosophy In the table of contents to his Prospectus of a History of English Philosophy, Hazlitt’s general view of the subject includes the claim that philosophy is ‘little more than common sense well understood’ (ii, 289). Yet the philosophical intervention of his own by which he set most store, that ‘metaphysical choke-pear’ the Essay on the Principles of Human Action, is, as Hazlitt himself frequently concedes with some pride, far from being the straightforward clarification of common sense. He describes it less as an accessible expansion of shared assumptions not usually brought to reflection, more as a philosophical adventure, one experienced in swimming against the prevailing empiricist tide in British theoretical speculation. In any case, an exercise in the exposition of inalienable prejudices would have supported Burke’s antispeculative arguments. While Hazlitt is on the common sense school’s side in most philosophical questions, as a political radical he must avoid its reputation for anti-sceptical conservatism. The complexities of his radicalism immediately emerge because he calls his opponent modern philosophy. But Hazlitt’s opposition to the ‘modern’ here is above all conceived as timely. Although the experiential bias of the founder of ‘modern philosophy’, Bacon, ‘was the most needed at the time … mind has for a good while past, been in some danger of being overlaid by matter. … We seem to have resigned the natural use of our understanding, and to have given up our own existence as a nonentity’ (ii, 115). To be ‘modern’ tout court is precisely not to be modern, not to apprehend the philosophical needs of the age: it is to be belated. These philosophical needs are satisfied neither by Burkean cultural nostalgia, nor by Benthamite iconoclasm, but by a reinvention of cultural tradition: indeed, we are to be revived by recovering the perception that culture is only apprehended through its reinvention. Complacent acquiescence in cultural heritage, the fault of Scott’s antiquarianism, ignores what such inheritance is (xi, 70–6). (The fact that Scott was a highly inventive recycler of historical crises to fuel his conservative outlook shows Hazlitt’s occasional blindness to the power of his opponents to corroborate the truth
Hazlitt and the ‘kings of speech’ 69 of his own perceptions.) It is worth trying harder to read the Essay’s argument this way round: as one that tries to rehabilitate common sense as much as it champions the natural disinterestedness of the human mind. The Essay ostensibly defends imagination against charges of self-indulgence because from the same faculty originates our sympathetic, unselfish intercession on behalf of others. Hazlitt produces an anti-Humean (and so common sense) argument against the sufficiency of impressions and ideas to explain our knowledge both of other minds and of personal identity. In thus critiquing empiricism he relies on ideas of publicity that could not derive from a private language of sensations. The effect, however, is as much to radicalize common sense, as it is to exonerate imagination from solipsism or selfishness. Joined in the Essay to the mechanism powering our most individual selfprojections, our conceptions of others generalize our own more conspicuously creative integrity. In fact Hazlitt’s literary, artistic and philosophical enthusiasms suggest that, in any case, expressions of individual self-projection themselves borrow perpetually from the language of others. But they do so by sympathy with the potential for ‘gusto’ or the powerfully individual inflexion that we share with other people rather than by isolating a bland common denominator. His own essays integrate marvellously inventive and pointed patchworks of quotations; their synthetic method insists that we maintain the richness of the category of the common; we are obliged perpetually to witness, through frequent citation, to the legitimacy and advantage of appropriating the language of others to promote our most intimate, private sense of self. Linguistically we remove the possessiveness of others’ linguistic success to dress an ego which otherwise would be an emperor without any clothes. In so doing we amplify and make a tradition of another’s usage, vindicating the individuality of their inflection by participating in it at our most essential moments. Then we appear as ‘impresario’, to use Tom Paulin’s apt word, of the images and quotations we employ.1 Hazlitt is never repetitious in his ventriloquizing; he never turns quotations into tags, is never sententious. The energy of renovation always irradiates his usage and ensures that his readers must keep their wits about them to be sure of grasping the new significance generated for old words by their application in the contemporary context. The sin of Romantic egotism, one that Hazlitt castigates in writings as various as Wordsworth’s and Byron’s, is incurred when the individual ignores the sources of its own originality in shared languages of power. This neglect or contempt sunders the connection between individual and social imaginings, the bond underwriting the genuine imaginative project described in the Essay. Paradoxically, in cases like Wordsworth’s, the more imaginative the poet, the less recognizable as such becomes his achievement: his is the poetry of ‘paradox’ (v, 161). This is the more familiar critique Hazlitt applied to his contemporaries. Isolated, it sounds like a Burkean defence of ‘the wardrobe of a moral imagination’. As much as Burke, Hazlitt deplores the aridity of experiments – political, aesthetic, moral – that take place in despite of tradition, the hortus
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siccus of a dissent contemptuous of what it cannot re-create. It is as if dissenting intellectuals like Godwin have to start from scratch because the alternative secularization and disenchantment of their religious heritage, the redeployment of Puritanism to good political purpose, exposes a loss of religious faith they find it unbearable to confront directly. (Milton’s historical advantage was, with the same words, to be able to do the politics without losing the faith.) But not so amenable to those of a less radical political persuasion than Hazlitt is the fact that his criticism also requires the congruence of the public with the private category in order to legitimize public authority. Authentic public standards of moral behaviour or political association, that is, must derive from the utmost we can conceive by way of our individual fulfilment. Now he sounds more like Shelley, someone, again, to whom he is otherwise opposed. This Rousseauean, and then Jacobin assumption dissolves individual and social difference, thus explaining how it is that, as he puts it in The Plain Speaker, ‘all men who have the use of speech are kings’ (xii, 337). This definition of kingship dissolves monarchic privilege in a shared competence that cannot sensibly be delegated to someone else. To have access to the creativity sedimented in the public language is to be animated by the most original form of self-expression. If situated in a corrupt public sphere, individual discourse is licensed to counter it by emptying itself of conventional virtues, demonstrating a freedom exemplary for the new political dispensation that should succeed the corrupt ancien régime. For Hazlitt, the egotism of a Rousseau, setting up his own interests as a standard of interest in general, models Robespierre’s voicing of the will of the people, and then, even more controversially if possible, the legitimacy of a Napoleon. Hazlitt’s (and Bentham’s) loyalty to Napoleon makes more sense if we understand it not as a kind of Stalinism, which its postRevolutionary expediency can resemble, but as a signal example of the accessibility of kingship to merit, an opportunity made available by the French Revolution, an irresistible inheritance which Hazlitt conceives of as a linguistic franchise. This primal conflation of public and private in Hazlitt’s thought, first worked out in the Essay, helps explain many of the conundrums in his writing. I think it is corroborated by Roy Park’s interpretation of Hazlitt on ‘abstraction’, and by Uttara Natarajan’s defence of his consistency on ‘power’.2 Park sees Hazlitt as opposing the empiricist mainstream view of knowledge as something that improves through our power to abstract and make generalizations. Instead, Hazlitt casts knowledge as the perception that so-called particulars are in fact highly abstract and biased views of the world that the original understanding must break through. In its search for a genuine, unabbreviated particularity, though, the individual only sets new public standards whose abstract nature will be revealed in its turn. In the case of culture, this movement is not straightforwardly progressive, but historical and idiomatic, its differences achieved by the ‘gusto’ of new tastes and intensities of artistic vision, an innovatory power not subject, as
Hazlitt and the ‘kings of speech’ 71 Natarajan stresses, to received sensations. Natarajan then explores the importance for Hazlitt of the resulting recognition of the common source shared by the power of private and public imaginations. The power common to genius and common sense requires the radicalization of politics through the innovations of individual vision and, reciprocally, turns that personal art into a socio-political act.3 Both the public category and the private that derives from and reworks it inevitably contribute to and temper each other. From his initial anti-Enlightenment stance to his final disillusionment with the Benthamite ‘new school of reform’, Hazlitt indicts offences against his exemplary binding together of collective with individual creativity. Mill could not, had he wished, have written his essays on Bentham and Hazlitt, rather than on Bentham and Coleridge, because for Hazlitt the individual difference that should identify Benthamite progress is also the means by which Coleridgean tradition should constitute and re-create itself. Hazlitt appears to have written entirely in the service of this idea. In his Reply to Malthus’s Essay on Population he anticipated such complete dedication when he wrote: ‘After all, it is impossible to answer a paradox satisfactorily. The real answer consists of the feelings and observations of our whole lives; and of course, it must be impossible to embody these in any single statement’ (i, 265). On the other hand, Hazlitt’s extraordinary optimism continues to be Jacobin, eventually even old-fashioned. He remains, perhaps more clearly, subject to the judgement of recent criticism, like that of Gregory Dart and Kevin Gilmartin, that he remains inflexible in response to evidence of the technological impossibility of maintaining a continuum of private and public in the modern age. Developing their objections, one can say that other writers are more alive to the historical elusiveness of the other to our desire for self-recognition (Shelley), more perceptive of the inherent struggle involved (Hegel), more circumspect concerning the frightening dissolutions that may then establish themselves as normal (Wordsworth). But while placing Hazlitt in this way remains important, one must recognize and, in my case, still celebrate the Jacobin intransigence or individualized ‘universality’ into which he so inimitably and undeniably looked ‘abroad’.
Kings Milton famously thought that monarchy was a state properly attributable only to God: ‘His state is kingly’. For the rest of us, temporary magistracy, qualified election to the drudgery of the administration of the commonwealth, was the only authority over others to which we might justly become entitled. But to equate kings and magistrates is in any case to destroy the privilege of monarchy, or, better, to make its commandment of the resources of the commonwealth an option for everyone. This is what Hazlitt suggests happens in cultural action. To deny that our individual take on the world is unavoidably enriched by the continuity of this private activity with a
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universe of public understanding, past, present and future, is perverse. It is like believing you can look at the world with a literal, uninformed eye, on the model adopted by British empiricist epistemology. Again, this view is like and unlike Burke: the epiphanic presence of the dead in anything that Hazlitt writes evidences our cultural mortgage to the literary idioms that have formed our language. But, far from being a fixed contract binding us against change and innovation, this is a continually negotiated affair, one whose transactions constitute the writing of history, the perpetual re-plotting of the differences between then and now. The language we inherit allows us to participate in the perpetual creativity testified to by the power of borrowed images to possess us in our inventive reapplication of them to contemporary circumstances. Neither juridical precedent nor repetition by rote, quotation activates a new articulacy saving past utterances from becoming sententiae, as Burke is saved for Hazlitt, with a timeliness that honours original linguistic inventiveness by releasing it from its initial affiliations, political, scientific or whatever. Hazlitt’s critical ‘impresario’ treats his linguistic subjects with the arbitrariness of a king! In so doing, though, he releases them rather than, as a real king might do, imprisons them with his lettres de cachet; he frees them from literalism and recruits them to figure his historical departures. Hazlitt often treads this path from the uninformed vision he deplores to that kind which, deploying the resonances of other writing in any individual piece of writing, finds something new to say in words of credible authority. He performs it, but he also describes it. In the Essay, for the photographic eye to model future being adequately, it would have to be ‘an inchanted mirror’ (i, 39). In his Lectures on Philosophy, Hazlitt states even more baldly, that merely ‘intentively considering’ an object such as a house is no guarantee that we could ever have a coherent idea of a house. In these examples, ‘imagination’ is what supplies the deficiencies of the eye, and it does so in Hazlitt’s explanations by turning vision into a language. Inspired by the performances of Edmund Kean, Hazlitt finds that ‘the actor’s eye (if truly inspired) comprehends more than is set down for him, starts at hidden fancies that only pale passion sees’ (xviii, 415). The ‘meaning’ of a vision like Kean’s is that ‘the eye is never silent’ (v, 180). But the translation of vision into language, dramatic synaesthesia, of course positions it within the history of language; echo, allusion, resonance of past usage immediately make us aware of the redeployment inherent in words, the iteration from which we gain our sense of history: ‘It is words that constitute all but the present moment’ (xii, 337). For Hazlitt, Horne Tooke’s ‘literalness of perception’ ensures that his writings on language never make this necessary journey into history but settle for a mechanical etymology or ‘epigrammatic logic’ that is an alternative to history (xi, 47; ii, 280). This is not fair on Tooke, who was, in his own brave way, as linguistically embattled on the radical side as Hazlitt, and whose etymology is only an exaggerated form of Hazlitt’s ideological reformulations
Hazlitt and the ‘kings of speech’ 73 of literary idioms. Hazlitt makes the same criticism of nominalist theories of meaning, which he associates with a French empiricism paralleling Tooke’s. The inability to assimilate Enlightenment progressiveness to his side leaves Hazlitt looking somewhat crudely Romantic, unable, unlike Shelley, say, to redeploy a considerable literary inheritance politically on his side in complex ways. But with the historical embeddedness of usage come those responsibilities to which Hazlitt gave such successfully polemical attention, each usage conveying an idiomatic judgement telling where it is we stand, a judgement taken from the way our choice of words seems loaded in order to suggest a view of the present in which they sound so different. It can be as simple as that, the fact of redeployment – like the aptness of Shakespeare’s words to Kean’s performance – suggesting the desired republic of letters without need of further decoding. Or else, intertextuality can be as complex and subtle as has been claimed by most recent critical readings of Hazlitt’s prose, especially by Paulin’s uncannily inward interpretations of Hazlitt’s imagery. Characteristic of Hazlitt’s practice, though, is the way he repeatedly foregrounds the problem to which his philosophy has supposedly found the solution. It is not simply that he records the splitting of public from private expression and vice versa; the symbiosis he claims for public and private often appears to be problematic. Tradition is the sort of thing that is renovated by creation and genuine creation is authenticated by the contribution it makes to tradition. Where one category seems devoid of the other, then Hazlitt’s critical pencil is hard at work. But at several well-known, spectacular moments in Hazlitt’s oeuvre, this dialectic looks historically impossible, indeed, its failure becomes a feature of the spirit of the age. ‘The spirit of poetry is in itself favourable to humanity and liberty: but, we suspect, not in times like these’ (vii, 142). Briefly, there is nothing poetical in the spirit of the age, and so creative minds like Wordsworth are forced into the untenable egotism of pure Dissent. His strength and greatness arise ‘from the excess of his weakness’ because he is forced to begin ‘de novo, on a tabula rasa of poetry’ (viii, 45; xi, 87). The extraordinary creativeness on which Hazlitt compliments him is inseparable from the comic spectacle of someone who (like God, presumably) takes ‘a personal interest in the universe’ (xi, 89). Hazlitt’s criticism, though, is complicated and enriched by the case of Wordsworth. By contrast, he deals very briskly with the paradox he finds in Shelley’s poetry: ‘that all things are by nature equally fit subjects for poetry’ (v, 162). Wordsworth’s democratic choice of subject ‘founded the new school [of the contemporary poetry of paradox] on a principle of sheer humanity, on pure nature void of art’. It is as if this literary Jacobinism, convinced (Adorno-like) of the moral exhaustion of any common language, has, by the second generation of English Romantics to which Shelley belongs, become glib and superficial. Modern poetry of Shelley’s kind, writes Hazlitt, here reviewing Shelley’s posthumous poems in 1824,
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Paul Hamilton has shuffled off, no doubt, its old pedantry and formality; but has at the same time lost all shape or purpose, except that of giving vent to some morbid feeling of the moment. The writer thus discharges a fit of the spleen or a paradox, and expects the world to admire and be satisfied … [with] the luxuriant growth of nature and fancy … eaten up with personality. (xvi, 279)
For this criticism, Shelley is, as The Plain Speaker has it, not a poet but ‘a sophist, a moralist, a controversial writer in verse’ (xii, 246). Like the modern philosophers, he makes ‘the limits of the understanding’ the measure of ‘man, providence, nature, and even his own heart’ (xvi, 269). And the isolation of his egotism, his false heterocosm, also follows the distortion of the nature of language so characteristic for Hazlitt of modern empiricism. This person of ‘sense’ gives us ‘for representations of things, rhapsodies of words’ (xii, 246). Shelley’s ‘robe of glittering words’ prevents him from ‘giving a language to thought, or lending the heart a tongue’ (xvi, 265). In The Plain Speaker, Hazlitt summons both Burke and Swift in his indignation against such ‘crude projectors’, such ‘tailors at Laputa’ (xii, 247–8). With respect to Shelley, Hazlitt is blind to a possible ally. The dilemma he mistakenly thinks Shelley does not address is exactly the dilemma faced by modern poetry in their time. Shelley revises and revives genres and kinds with a sharp eye to the ideological implications of his fast and loose use of masque, epic, Jacobean tragedy, conversation poem, Greek tragedy, medieval visionary poem, and so on. His egotism is always expressed in knowing contrast to the Wordsworthian egotism he opposes. It does not repeat the errors of reification his aesthetics attack, nor does it present ‘an abstract theory, as if it were a given part of actual nature … an impertinence and indecorum’ (xii, 246). Its indecorousness is only calculated to expose the historical variability of establishments – literary and political – through imaginative raids and appropriations of which Hazlitt’s own practice should approve. Hazlitt’s criticism comes down to Peacock’s, which is to say that Shelley is not read enough, that he is not popular enough. Well, the Chartists happily read Queen Mab like a bible, and the drive of his revisionary art is towards that genre-crossing competence and fluency of the Roman, the tendency also of Byron’s and Keats’s work, whose rebirth in the novel loses its radical impetus if that origin in Romantic visionariness is not remembered. The use of poetry to encourage the much-needed inventions of new forms of sociability in response to the failure of the French Revolution is Shelley’s ongoing motive. The extraordinary revision of Rousseau that he undertakes in The Triumph of Life, at the end of his own short life, can be plausibly viewed as a condensed attempt to formulate what Hazlitt worked through in his critical lifetime. One can further regret Hazlitt’s short way with Shelley as a result of appreciating his patience with Wordsworth. For Wordsworth is only the
Hazlitt and the ‘kings of speech’ 75 ‘greatest’ example of that re-creative component of genuine cultural understanding. His egotism is historically intensified, no doubt, but also true to Hazlitt’s denial that ‘an end is only of value in itself, and not as it draws out the living resources, and satisfies the original capacities of human nature’ (xx, 307). This regulative idea is only achieved through egotism. In the same article on ‘The Spirit of Controversy’, published in The Athenaeum near the end of Hazlitt’s life in January 1830, we hear that ‘to leave egotism out of human nature, is “to leave the part of Hamlet out of the play of Hamlet”’ (xx, 308–9). And Wordsworth’s susceptibility to historical pressure is also, in Hazlitt’s descriptions of him, the source of his remarkable power to speak to contemporary events and tendencies: his poetry ‘partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary movement of our age: the political changes of the day were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical experiments. His muse … is a levelling one’ (xi, 87). Wordsworth so far appears exemplary. He raises the standard of the Levellers of the English Revolution, but in the colours of the French Revolution. And this retrieval shows that Jacobinical poetry may disdain current public standards of expression but has an alternative genealogy resourcing its ‘new view or aspect of nature’ (xi, 90). It provides an archaeology; it draws upon and renews our perception of a neglected historical reserve. Walter Benjamin famously contrasted the Jacobin and Marxian revolutions on just those grounds: the former possessed classical republican ideals in which to dress itself, while the latter remained ‘a tiger’s leap into the past’.4 It is historically impossible for Hazlitt to become Benjamin’s ‘collector’ figure, wrenching literary objects out of their historical encrustations to reveal their hidden attributes and their shocking relevance for today. But he is on the same revolutionary road, and Paulin’s descriptions of his literary substitutions of Wordsworthian ‘spots of time’ suggests an anticipation of those Proustian and Freudian moments of textual revelation so important to Benjamin.5 As is well-known, Hazlitt resented Wordsworth’s handy deployment of Jacobinism in poetry to the neglect of radicalism in politics. To write egotistically, assuming your personal interests will become popular because public modes of expression are morally bankrupt, is clearly inconsistent with a Tory willingness to endorse the real-life establishment. So the mature Wordsworth is condemned for inconsistency, when ‘with one stroke of his prose pen’ he disenfranchises people he permits to star in his lyrical ballads and longer poems. But much of Hazlitt’s criticism suggests that there just is something about poetry that is not Jacobinical. Jacobinism in poetry is misplaced whether or not its writer is a Jacobin in politics. In his letter to The Examiner of January 1817, Hazlitt states unequivocally that ‘The spirit of Jacobinism is essentially at variance with the spirit of poetry … it levels all distinctions of art and nature’ (vii, 144). In John Kinnaird’s memorable 1963 article for the Partisan Review, this meant that Hazlitt saw no ‘abstract purity’ free from ‘personal bias’. Like Julien Benda, Kinnaird’s picture
76 Paul Hamilton implies, Hazlitt diagnosed a trahison des clercs, intellectuals’ culpable dereliction of impartial standards in order to engage in an all-encompassing ideological battle. His own ideas on ‘gusto’, and the contradiction between his enthusiasm for the poetic power he politically deplored and his criticism of the poetry whose politics he endorsed, then implicated him in the same dilemma. This is perhaps too simple. Hazlitt instead argues that to aestheticize politics by writing Jacobin poetry of Wordsworth’s kind is culpably to reverse the enfranchising logic of Jacobinism by destroying the poetic privileges to which the reader should be given access. Seamus Deane and Uttara Natarajan have written well on this point; in the terms of this essay, the displacement of Jacobin politics on to poetry works against its original politics by refusing the reader the chance to be one of the ‘kings of speech’.6 Hazlitt’s most powerful critical effect is to get his readers to think through quotations, and so benefit from his opening of cultural reservoirs to irrigate the understanding of the common reader. The idea that poetry should no longer be ‘right royal’ removes this target (iv, 214). Equally, poets who make their singularity unapproachable and not open to appropriation take on the fatal but exclusive attractions of Coriolanus. Except that precisely what such poets as might be figured by Coriolanus’s magnificent language deny to their art is the dramatic dimension that lends itself to reincarnation and perpetuates and propels forward poetry’s critical afterlife and continuing timeliness. Coriolanus is not Shakespeare, but not to feel the threat of Coriolanus is not to feel the power poetry has to ‘[bribe] the passions to make a sacrifice of common humanity’ (ix, 37). In the same letter to William Gifford, though, Hazlitt sketches how poetry also undoes this tyrannical arbitrariness through making its language generally available for our own dramatic rehearsals and re-enactments: we are all poets, inasmuch as we are under the influence of the passions and imagination, that is, as we have certain common feelings, and undergo the same process of mind with the poet, who only expresses in a particular manner what he and all feel alike. (ix, 45) That should have annoyed Gifford as much as did Keats, Hunt and Cockney republicanism generally. Gifford is to be discomfited by Hazlitt’s slander on kings by associating them with arbitrary power, and by his claim, effectively forcing their abdication, that poetry can articulate their violence in the language of our common birthright, in the shape of an ‘original sin’. The monarchical language in the Coriolanus essay is insistent, capturing exactly what Hazlitt believes Wordsworth’s poetic experiment ostensibly represses: The principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium. It is every thing by
Hazlitt and the ‘kings of speech’ 77 excess. It rises above the ordinary standard of sufferings and crimes. It presents a dazzling appearance. It shows its head turreted, crowned and crested. (iv, 214) This description recalls Milton’s Satan in Eden, with his ‘turret crest’, tempting Eve to aspire to the kingly state – Satan, that figure for Romantics like Blake and Shelley of a poetic afflatus in excess of religious domestication. Hazlitt’s words are also significantly contemporaneous with Keats’s Lamia, also glorying in her ‘crest’ and ‘starry crown’. Figuring negative capability, she is the ironic, knowing facilitator of the powerful men in the poem, such as the crowned Hermes, he of the ‘serpent rod’, god of thieves, liar and guide to Hades. To give us the sense of power abstracted from the sense of good is to make our pleasures unaccountable. It is an ‘unaccountable mixture of seeming simplicity and real abstruseness’ that Hazlitt detects in Wordsworth’s poetry (xi, 87). In the context of Hazlitt’s critical theory, to be ‘unaccountable’ means to be irresponsible or unanswerable to anyone as much as it means to be obscure. In other words, Wordsworth, great poet as Hazlitt concedes him to be, must fall in with the power-hungry, aggrandizing logic of imagination and poetry whether he likes it or not, repress it as he may. Hence he ‘tramples on the pride of art with greater pride’ (xi, 87). And that too can be an exciting spectacle. It is paradoxically exclusive, though, to devise, as Wordsworth does, a Jacobin poetry that requires highly recondite knowledge of the poetic canon to appreciate its economies and powerful self-denials. The Jacobinism should have resided in that Satanic mimicry of monarchy; it should have offered its masquerade as a serpentine disguise, a use of the aesthetic experientially to examine the nature of untrammelled power and so its need for proper socialization and acculturation.
Speech What was Hazlitt’s idea of a language in which we might be ‘kings’? ‘English’, wrote Keats in his famous retreat from poetic exclusiveness, ‘ought to be kept up’.7 Like Shelley and Byron, Keats moved towards this conclusion through an apprenticeship in most available poetic forms of writing. His prosaic or aesthetically undifferentiated terminus of ‘English’ remembers its journey, detailed in Keats’s letter, through English poetic history. Only through literary memory, the construction of Keats’s argument suggests, can the standards which the democratic use of English ought to meet be preserved. Speech, or the use of language bound to context but thronged with other echoes, was the active instrument of Hazlitt’s philosophical and critical thought, plain speech. When, in Canto Four of Childe Harold, Byron ostensibly abandons fame as a noble Lord in order to be ‘remembered in my land’s language’, the democratic gesture is again framed by literary example, stretching from the ‘Attic Muse’, through Dante and
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Petrarch to his own day. (This is the Canto also with the lines ‘Our life is a false nature’ etc., which Peacock mocked for their obscurity, although his satire proved Byron’s success in making the ‘Byronic’ role available to all and sundry.) In principle, at least, there is a solidarity here with Hazlitt that binds critical practice and theory to the fate of a Romanticism that journeys through literary revolution and revisionism towards the form of the novel. The novel’s radical prose inclusiveness and historicism were to be celebrated by Lukács and its original radical rationale in Jena theory inspired Benjamin. Poetry has a future, but it also helps create a future for prose. English, then, is Hazlitt’s philosophical weapon against the empiricists, one which obstinately resists abstraction and is vivid with the consciousness of effective usage. In the flagship essay of The Plain Speaker, ‘On The Prose Style of Poets’, we are told that good prose, good English, replaces the ‘power’ given us by poetic ‘pleasure’ when instead of being ‘the slave of style’ we become ‘master of [our] materials’ (xii, 9). But the felicities of prose derive from its recovery of ‘the mere characteristic harmony which ought to subsist between the sound and the sense’ (xii, 5). Elsewhere this is described by Hazlitt as a poetic virtue; ‘for poetry is music also’, and is able to repair ‘the inherent defect of harmony in the customary mechanism of language, to make the sound an echo to the sense’ (v, 297; xii, 12). Its prose incarnation reinforces the idea that Hazlitt’s intensely sensuous (erotic, in Paulin’s convincing descriptions) engagement with prose envisages a future for poetry, one that translates conventional poetic elevation into something generally serviceable without loss of pleasure or excitement. Hazlitt’s extraordinary little essay on the ‘Definition of Wit’, published posthumously in 1836, resumes in miniature much of the philosophical position on language established in his New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue, published in 1809. … we attend only to the inference, the intention [words] are meant to communicate. This merging of the sound in the sense, of the means in the end … common sense, the business of life, and the limitation of the human faculties dictate. (xx, 354) Poetic virtue, secreted again in that harmony of sound and sense, the source of prosody, is granted different forms in different uses of language. This is spelled out in the Grammar: We have endeavoured to show … that the grammatical distinctions of words do not relate to the nature of the things or ideas spoken of, but to our manner of speaking of them, i.e. to the particular point of view in which we have occasion to consider them, or combine them with others in the same discourse. … The things themselves do not change, but it is we who view them in a different connection with other things, and who
Hazlitt and the ‘kings of speech’ 79 accordingly use different sorts of words to show the difference of the situation which they occupy in our thoughts and discourse. (ii, 6–7) Hazlitt is here primarily refuting empiricist theories of grammar, claiming that individual parts of speech gain their meaning from what they are used to refer to and not from what they refer to.8 But this description of the nuts and bolts of linguistic articulation extends throughout the rest of his work to his critical distinctions between different styles, and so to his characterization of the prosaic, democratic legacy of great poetic achievement. This impulse to translate, to make commonly available, to communicate, must be borne in mind at those moments when Hazlitt appears simply to be defending linguistic propriety. Everyone translates in Hazlitt’s writings, because the basic act of understanding is for him a kind of translation. He condemns words that substitute for things through merely ‘verbal’ dexterity; he commends words whose tangibility makes them most like things in a revelatory way, noting in a travelogue that ‘words may be said, after all, to be the finest things in the world. Things themselves are but a lower species of words, exhibiting the grossness and details of matter’ (x, 207). Like Saussure, Hazlitt sees that words are not ‘motivated’, they do not resemble their material referents, indicating instead our point of view; ‘but’, he writes, ‘poetry makes these odds all even’ (v, 12). Hazlitt’s allusion, from the Duke’s speech in Measure for Measure, remembers that however much we talk ourselves out of an appetite for life, it is the remembrance of death that restores it. Similarly, however much we may believe the opposite, we use and treat words as if they are material components of our lives. Hence come bad effects too, like the force of nicknames, or Burke’s rhetorical power to melt down differences in order to prevail polemically over his opponents. Unjustified translation reduces the original, but the mastery of materials achieved by good prose carries an idiomatic authority in which the tangibility of words is fully exploited without necessarily entailing political bias. Unlike idiosyncrasies, idioms, according to Hazlitt’s Grammar, ‘have been invented to supply the defects of the general structure of language’, and so are signal examples of individual inflexion offered up for collective use (ii, 87). An idiom is characteristic usage, a use of words whose personal bias has become part of linguistic identity, part of what it is to speak English fluently, from the inside. Speech is, for Hazlitt, an absolute category. It is not a literary absolute, but a limit experience for the collective and individual poles of all experience. Hazlitt has little to say about the sublime, the aesthetic category in which contemporary transgressions of shared categories were fashionably rescued for common sense. Instead, he gives us an endless perspective of languages which human extremity, however genuine, can never outrun. From his conversations with Northcote, it emerges that ‘expression only comes into the face as we are at a loss for words’ (xi, 277). The failure of
80 Paul Hamilton language brings into play an expressive response, which is, nevertheless, the language of that failure. As with an idiom, the drawing of a personal boundary collapses into a general aptitude. What appeared as an individual failing turns into not merely expression but an expression, a meaningful locution, and therefore located in a language we can ourselves deploy. This, I suggest, is what happens to Romanticism both in Hazlitt’s view of it, and as a feature of its own project.
Part II
Influences
6
The Road to Nether Stowey Duncan Wu
‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ is our principal witness for events during Hazlitt’s visit to Nether Stowey and Alfoxden in late May 1798. Its popularity derives not just from what it reveals of Wordsworth and Coleridge at a vitally important moment in their creative lives, but from its ingeniously constructed myth of initiation into their work. For those reasons, we should be wary of accepting it as the final word on the events it describes. Take, for instance, the time-scale of Hazlitt’s stay: in the essay it seems to span only a few days, when in fact he was there for three weeks. And it is inconceivable that he failed to make the acquaintance of Berkeley Coleridge, born ten days prior to his arrival. Berkeley was described as possessing a ‘noble and lovely style of beauty, his large, soft eyes, of a “London-smoke” colour, exquisite complexion, regular features and goodly size’; his father was reported to have been ‘very proud of him’, showing him off to admirers, one of whom must have included Hazlitt.1 Nor can he have failed to make friends with Hartley Coleridge, four months from his second birthday; in 1803 he would paint his portrait.2 By all accounts, he got on with both of them such that Coleridge could tell Thomas Wedgwood that Hazlitt ‘is very fond of, attentive to, & patient with, children’.3 But ‘My First Acquaintance’ makes no mention of Coleridge’s family, nor does it mention Joseph Cottle, the intended publisher of Lyrical Ballads, who in the midst of Hazlitt’s stay returned to Bristol with manuscripts of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ and many of Wordsworth’s poems for the new volume.4 This is not to criticize ‘My First Acquaintance’, which is a masterpiece of its kind, but to question the tendency among some biographers and critics to accept its account as exhaustive. In this essay I wish to recover – and speculate on – some lost conversations of that important moment. Looming behind them is a book that did not yet exist – Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action, published in 1805.5 Its central argument, which Hazlitt referred to as his theory of disinterestedness, had been formulated as long before as 1794 or 1795. In October 1796 he reported to his father that he had composed half a dozen pages of the Essay in shorthand, summarizing his system as one that ‘founds the propriety of virtue on it’s coincidence with the pursuit of private interest, and of the imperfections inseparable from it’s
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scheme’.6 The manuscript had grown further by the time he met Coleridge in January 1798, but rather than show it to him Hazlitt attempted to explain his ‘philosophical discovery’, with the unfortunate result that ‘I did not succeed in making myself understood’. All the same, he clearly impressed his new friend, because a month after the Wem encounter, Coleridge asked John Wicksteed to convey to him the ‘respect due to his talents’.7 This can only have been a reference to Hazlitt’s intellectual abilities. Coleridge’s good opinion was enforced by their conversations at Stowey and Alfoxden, which must have covered similar ground. The difference is that in Somerset Wordsworth was also a participant. Years later, in the unpublished ‘A Reply to “Z”’, Hazlitt recalled having explained his metaphysical theory to Wordsworth: ‘when I once explained the argument of that Essay to Mr Wordsworth (and it is a hard matter to explain any thing to him) I remember he said he thought there was something in it, but it was what every shoemaker must have thought of’ (ix, 4). The most likely moment for this is May–June 1798. Wordsworth himself told Barron Field that he had ‘little or no knowledge of H[azlitt]’s writings except his first metaphysical Work – I had reasons for this which need not be named’.8 When Wordsworth said that, he was in his seventieth year, and reading ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ for the first time. That the one work of Hazlitt’s he had ‘knowledge of’ was ‘his first metaphysical Work’ is not that surprising in view of the fact that a copy of the Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) was sent to Grasmere by Lamb in February 1806, which when Wordsworth made this comment was in his library at Rydal Mount.9 Though intended for Coleridge it seems never to have entered his possession. When sent north by Lamb (apparently a gift of Hazlitt), Coleridge was in Italy, not to reach England for another six months. It would not be surprising had Wordsworth forgotten to pass it on to him. It is also possible that, in order to help acquit himself better than in January, Hazlitt took a manuscript to Nether Stowey and showed it to Wordsworth and Coleridge. In December 1800 Coleridge apparently described Hazlitt’s manuscript as a ‘jumble’.10 Hazlitt would have expounded his theory to Wordsworth and Coleridge not just for the reasons already mentioned, but because he would have known that they had conceived a philosophy to be argued in Wordsworth’s epic poem, ‘The Recluse’. Like much else, ‘The Recluse’ is not mentioned in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, where Wordsworth is hailed as the author of Lyrical Ballads and Peter Bell. But there are good reasons for regarding that omission as another act of editorial license on Hazlitt’s part. ‘The Recluse’ was begun in January or February 1798 at Alfoxden, and by the time Hazlitt arrived at Stowey comprised 1,300 lines of poetry. It had been decided in early March that Coleridge and the Wordsworths would leave Somerset and go to Germany later in the year where, as Wordsworth told his friend James Losh, ‘we purpose to pass the two ensuing years in order to acquire the German language, and to furnish ourselves with a tolerable
The road to Nether Sowey 85 stock of information in natural science’.11 The principal motive for these tasks was ‘The Recluse’, which as Wordsworth told another correspondent, James Webbe Tobin, would ‘contrive to convey most of the knowledge of which I am possessed. … Indeed I know not any thing which will not come within the scope of my plan’.12 In 1815 Coleridge would recall his hope that it would be ‘the first and only true Phil. Poem in existence’.13 Despite saying nothing of it in ‘My First Acquaintance’, Hazlitt must have known about ‘The Recluse’ in 1798. Neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth would have wished to conceal it; indeed they would have wanted to discuss it with him, Coleridge especially. It was, after all, the descendant of ‘Religious Musings’ and his proposed but never to be written poem, ‘The Brook’.14 A passage from ‘The Recluse’ had been sent to his brother George in early March, when Coleridge reported that ‘The Recluse’ was ‘as likely to benefit mankind much more than any thing Wordsworth has yet written’.15 These ambitions for ‘The Giant Wordsworth – God love him!’16 would not have been hidden from the twenty-year-old who on 20 May 1798 arrived at Coleridge’s cottage, footsore, having taken a circuitous route from Wem to Cambridge and then to Stowey – where, as he would recall 25 years later, ‘I … was well received’ (Wu, ix, 103). Why did Hazlitt not mention ‘The Recluse’ in ‘My First Acquaintance’? The obvious explanation is that by 1823 it was identified with the pompous, self-preening image of Wordsworth, due as much to the Preface to The Excursion as to such reviewers as Hazlitt’s friend, Francis Jeffrey. Mention of it in ‘My First Acquaintance’ might have raised expectations that he was attempting to reinforce that line of attack – not his primary intention. He had no wish to defend Wordsworth either, and that would have been the other reason for mentioning it.17 Given the probability that he knew of it in 1798, Hazlitt may have hoped that Wordsworth and Coleridge might appreciate the superiority of his theories over those of ‘The Recluse’ and perhaps be moved to reconsider their own – not as overweening a wish as it sounds. He had been educated at home by his father, whose tutor at Glasgow University had been Adam Smith, and had attended the Unitarian New College in Hackney, where metaphysics was taught by some of the finest intellectuals of the day. Even at the tender age of twenty he was fully qualified to advise on ‘The Recluse’. That would have made Wordsworth’s opinion of his theory of disinterestedness – that it was ‘what every shoemaker must have thought of’ – all the more wounding. Perhaps Wordsworth suspected Hazlitt’s ideas to be superior to those formulated for ‘The Recluse’, but wanted to persuade himself otherwise. Hazlitt indicates another reason for anxiety on Coleridge and Wordsworth’s part when, in his Letter to William Gifford, having summarized his philosophical theory, he remarks: Some persons, who formerly took the pains to read this work, imagined (do not be alarmed, Sir!) that I wanted to argue them out of their own
86 Duncan Wu existence, merely because I endeavoured to define the nature and meaning of this word, self; to take in pieces, by metaphysical aid, this fine illusion of the brain and forgery of language, and to shew what there is real, and what false in it. (Wu, v, 377) Hazlitt does not identify the ‘persons’ who ‘formerly took the pains to read’ his Essay, nor is it explained when or where these objections were set forth. But there is cause to propose Wordsworth and Coleridge as candidates, and Alfoxden or Nether Stowey as the place where they took issue with him. In essence, the objection Hazlitt cites is the threat his ideas posed to the ‘nature and meaning of this word, self’, the specific charge being that he had tried ‘to take in pieces, by metaphysical aid, this fine illusion of the brain and forgery of language’. This echoes the accusation in ‘The Tables Turned’: Sweet is the lore which nature brings; Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things; – We murder to dissect. (ll. 25–8) That last line has become a shorthand way of referring to Wordsworth’s supposed reluctance to intellectualize. It is elaborated in a question posed in the Two-Part Prelude in Germany six months later: But who shall parcel out His intellect by geometric rules, Split like a province into round and square; Who knows the individual hour in which His habits were first sown, even as a seed; Who that shall point as with a wand and say, This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain? (Part 2, ll. 242–9) If these lines are an amplification of ‘The Tables Turned’, they show that its target is not the intellectualizing impulse. On the contrary, under Coleridge’s guidance Wordsworth had become sufficiently conversant with philosophical theories to manipulate them in such ‘Recluse’ fragments as ‘Not Useless do I deem’, and understood that the larger enterprise of ‘The Recluse’ was to bring a redemptive system to the attention of the reading public. To that end, they had planned the German tour in order to establish their mastery of the discipline then emerging from Jena and Weimar. Wordsworth is critical not of philosophy as such, but of its misuse: the
The road to Nether Sowey 87 desire to use metaphysics to ‘take in pieces’ the inner self, to expose the brain as a ‘fine illusion’, to be argued out of one’s existence. ‘The Tables Turned’ and to a greater extent the Two-Part Prelude argue for the essential unknowability of the psyche – something Hazlitt’s theory of disinterestedness appeared to threaten. It is understandable that a poet whose principal subject was the sovereign uniqueness of the mind (in particular his own) might recoil from a theory that anatomized it. In a supreme irony, that reservation provided an insight to which Hazlitt was frequently to resort in later years – that Wordsworth’s poetry was dependent on a form of tentative self-analysis that carefully nurtured the mind’s inscrutability. To Hazlitt’s way of thinking this was precious, selfregarding, and egotistical – a charge which in later years he did not hesitate to lay at Wordsworth’s door. In his Examiner review of The Excursion he commented that ‘An intense intellectual egotism swallows up every thing’, and ‘The power of his mind preys upon itself’ (Wu, ii, 327); in the Lectures on the English Poets Wordsworth ‘tolerates only what he himself creates. … He sees nothing but himself and the universe’ (Wu, ii, 316); reviewing Byron in 1818, Hazlitt dismisses ‘Wordsworth’s arbitrary egotism and pampered self-sufficiency’ (Wu, ix, 32); in ‘A Reply to “Z”’ he admits that ‘I have spoken of his intellectual egotism (and truly and warrantably) as the bane of his talents and of his public principles’ (ix, 5); while, most memorably of all, Wordsworth is condemned in The Spirit of the Age as ‘the God of his own idolatry!’ (Wu, vii, 169). Though slanted against their target these remarks contain a kernel of truth and for that reason influenced others, most notably Keats, whose comments on ‘the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone’ are influenced by Hazlitt.18 If those ‘persons, who formerly took the pains to read this work’ were indeed Wordsworth and Coleridge, the ultimate irony is that their objections were unfounded. Far from being anatomized by Hazlitt’s Essay, the concept of the self is revalued by it. His theory vests the power to act and make moral choices in the innate faculties of the mind. As Hazlitt would have observed, the mechanism on which ‘The Recluse’ predicated the moral perfection of humanity did not allow for such autonomy, demanding instead submission to a necessitarian plan. I take this to be the theme of an argument that spanned some time – possibly days – but which goes unmentioned in ‘My First Acquaintance’. I wish now to examine in detail the intellectual differences between the three protagonists, comparing the principles formulated for ‘The Recluse’ with Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Actions. But before doing so, an informative remark that does appear in the essay helps pin down the date on which their discussions began. On 23 May Hazlitt walked to Alfoxden with Coleridge to hear Wordsworth recite Peter Bell. That evening Wordsworth and Dorothy accompanied them on the road to Nether Stowey in the course of which, according to ‘My First Acquaintance’,
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Wordsworth’s explanation in the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads placed the blame squarely on Hazlitt: ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’, he wrote, ‘arose out of conversation with a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy’.19 Significantly, though, Wordsworth recalled in his Fenwick Notes that the poems were written ‘in front of the house of Alfoxden’ – which means that they must have been written subsequent to the argument of 23 May, suggesting in turn that it spanned more than one evening.20 It also emphasizes the speed with which they were written, for at the end of May Cottle would depart for Bristol, taking the manuscripts with him.21 That means that these poems were probably in fair copy within a week of the ‘metaphysical argument’ itself (perhaps less), the rapidity of their completion being a clue as to the strength of feeling behind them. According to ‘Expostulation and Reply’ the metaphysical argument was sparked off by a careless remark by Hazlitt along the lines of the first three stanzas. Why, William, on that old grey stone, Thus for the length of half a day, Why, William, sit you thus alone, And dream your time away? Where are your books? that light bequeath’d To beings else forlorn and blind! Up! Up! and drink the spirit breath’d From dead men to their kind. You look round on your mother earth As if she for no purpose bore you; As if you were her first-born birth, And none had lived before you! (‘Expostulation and Reply’, ll. 1–12) This does not amount to a ‘metaphysical argument’, and it is hard to believe that Hazlitt said anything of the kind. The likelihood that these words are attributed to him as a way of engineering the context for what follows is supported by the relocation of the poem to Esthwaite and Hazlitt’s renaming as ‘Matthew’. All the same, there are elements in Matthew’s
The road to Nether Sowey 89 remarks that point to the distinctive context of Hazlitt’s visit. He had known him only for two days, but Wordsworth would have realized that Hazlitt was exceptionally well read, having developed his theory out of ideas encountered in books – the same ones, in fact, that informed ‘The Recluse’. This seems to have made Wordsworth indignant, leading him to compose two poems exposing the redundancy of book-learning when compared with ‘wise passiveness’. It was a fitting rebuff to someone whose best idea was ‘what every shoemaker must have thought of’. ‘The Recluse’ was always to be ‘a philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society’.22 And yet the last two stanzaic poems written for Lyrical Ballads argue in favour not of its philosophy but of a Wordsworthian love of nature – the ability to perceive the powers ‘Which of themselves our minds impress, / That we can feed this mind of ours, / In a wise passiveness’.23 Wise passiveness was not new in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poetry. Coleridge’s ‘indolent and passive brain’ in ‘The Eolian Harp’ had been similarly receptive to the ‘one intellectual breeze’ (that is to say, a spiritual force) there described as ‘the Soul of each, and God of All’. Wordsworth and Coleridge understood passivity to be a crucial element of the mystic apprehension of nature which ‘The Recluse’ was to advocate. Perhaps inspired by conversations on the subject, Wordsworth explored it in a blank verse fragment of spring 1798: a holy indolence Compared to which our best activity Is oftimes deadly bane They rest upon their oars Float down the mighty stream of tendency In a calm mood of holy indolence A most wise passiveness in which the heart Lies open and is well content to feel As nature feels and to receive her shapes As she has made them.24 This state of pure receptiveness is based on Berkeley’s premise that objects in the material world (‘things’) are ideas in the mind of God. In a Wordsworthian twist those ideas are identified with objects in the natural world, which thereby becomes the force by which the mind is tutored – recast in nature’s image. Though both Berkleyan and Wordsworthian (in the sense that it foregrounds nature rather than God), Coleridge had invented this idea, and was the first to exploit it, when in the first version of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’, sent to Southey in July 1797, he wrote of how in imagination the Quantock Hills became ‘Less gross than bodily’, appending the footnote: ‘You remember, I am a Berkleian’.25
90 Duncan Wu Although Hazlitt would have had reservations about this, philosophical idealism was something to which he was well disposed. Indeed, Berkeley’s influence is evident in his theory in its sense of the mind’s ability to turn thought to substance, as well as in the suggestion that the mind contained a thinking principle beyond receptivity to sense impressions. And that, of course, was precisely why Hazlitt would have objected to the adaptation of Berkeley’s ideas wrought by Coleridge. Where he had been careful to preserve the autonomous freedom of the mind, Coleridge imprisoned it within a continuous, irresistible process of re-education. As Wordsworth had written in lines for ‘Not Useless do I Deem’, sent to Coleridge’s brother in March, the man ‘Once taught to love such objects … needs must feel / The Joy of that pure principle of Love’ (my italics).26 There is no option for the re-educated mind but to ‘feel’ love communicated through the natural forms that have entered into it. Such compulsion went against the grain with Hazlitt, the project of his philosophy being to restore emphasis to the will and objects of volition. Had this come up in conversation (as ‘The Tables Turned’ appears to suggest), other aspects of their respective theories would have followed, most obviously the necessitarianism of ‘The Recluse’. ‘I am a compleat Necessitarian’, Coleridge proudly announced to Southey in late 1794, ‘and understand the subject as well almost as Hartley himself’.27 This was thanks in large part to his adherence to aspects of Hartleyan theory promoted by Priestley in his Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1782), which he was reading enthusiastically at the time. Still an important part of his thought in 1798, the belief that associational mechanisms in the mind inevitably transformed self-interest into a disinterested benevolence towards others and converted love of self into love of family and friends was an essential component of ‘The Recluse’. Wordsworth too could lay down the law of necessity with the most dictatorial of political theorists. It is no accident that one of the most memorable vignettes in The Spirit of the Age (probably dating from 1795) is that of Wordsworth telling a law student to throw aside his books and ‘read Godwin on Necessity’ (Wu, vii, 88). In the weeks before Hazlitt’s arrival at Stowey he had been working on a poem called ‘Description of a Beggar’ (later to become ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’), intended for ‘The Recluse’, in which the old man’s utility consists in his skill to call forth acts of charity, stimulating feelings of benevolence followed by self-congratulation (Wordsworth’s phrase). From this Wordsworth concludes that he should not be sent to the workhouse – not because he will be happier outside, but because there he would no longer be able to fulfil his task of moral improvement. Here is my transcription of the relevant lines from a manuscript draft of spring 1798. Whereer the aged Beggar takes his rounds The mild necessity of use compels To acts of love and habit does the work
The road to Nether Sowey 91 Of Reason, yet prepares that after-joy Which Reason cherishes. And thus the soul By that sweet taste of pleasure unpursued Doth find itself insensibly disposed To virtue and true goodness.28 These lines aim to illustrate, through a practical application, theories stated in abstract in ‘Not Useless do I Deem’. Specifically, they describe a mechanism within the mind that leaves the individual no choice but to perform ‘acts of love and habit’ in preparation for ‘that after-joy / Which Reason cherishes’, the trigger being the old man’s regular appearances. Necessity is mild because of the ‘after-joy’ experienced by those responsible, however ‘compelled’ their behaviour might have been. Free will is the price paid for moral and spiritual reform. Rehabilitating the Godwinian totem of reason, these lines show that Coleridge and Wordsworth regarded themselves as providing the ultimate response to Godwin in a poem that converts rationality into the vehicle for a coerced ‘after-pleasure’ consequent upon good conduct. Hazlitt would have perceived the clumsiness of this, and perhaps found it symptomatic of the unoriginality of the philosophical regimen of ‘The Recluse’. By contrast, his theory claimed true liberty for the mind by dint of the fact that motives arise not from sensory responses to external impressions but from its innate constitution, which is held to will the outcome by which moral judgements are made. His argument is that as empowered individuals we are free to make our own choices rather than submit to their determination from without. He was the advocate of neither passivity nor necessity, but of the mind’s inherent freedom. In 1809 he would write that the mind is free, in as far as it is not the slave of external impressions, physical impulses, or blind senseless motives. It is free, as the body is free, when it is not subject to a power out of itself, though its operations still depend on certain powers and principles within itself. (ii, 118) As Hazlitt would have understood, Coleridge had incorporated into ‘The Recluse’ the Hartleyan view that the processes of the mind are determined by the properties of physical matter. That is why ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘The Pedlar’, and ‘Not Useless do I Deem’ are full of references to ‘forms’ and ‘shapes’ which are said to ‘impress’ themselves upon the mind, dictating its thoughts. From Coleridge’s point of view, this was vital because it implied the existence of the Unitarian God who as external first cause determined the impressions made on the senses and the manner in which our ideas originate. Hence Wordsworth’s reference in ‘The Pedlar’ to a visionary world perceptible to the Pedlar, ‘And to the God who looked into his mind’.29 From that perspective, Hartley was useful for affirming God’s centrality
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within the cosmos at a time when deistic or atheistic approaches such as those advocated by Paine and Godwin competed for the attention of radically-minded intellectuals. No wonder Coleridge had hailed Hartley as ‘patriot, and saint, and sage’ in Religious Musings.30 Hazlitt saw the imagination rather than God as the first cause in the associative process – an observation integral to his model of the empowered mind. If the discussion reached this point he would have been hard put not to mention that he was an atheist. As such, he allowed for the possibility of the divine in art as well as nature, but did not see it as having anything to do with the existence of a deity. It is the imagination, not God, that Hazlitt perceives as unifying the order of nature. His is a secular philosophy with its faith – if such it may be called – in the workings of the mind. It is possible that the opportunity had arisen for him to tell Coleridge of this at Wem when, as he recalled in ‘My First Acquaintance’, Coleridge ill-advisedly smashed one of his idols. He spoke slightingly of Hume (whose Essay on Miracles he said was stolen from an objection started in one of South’s Sermons – Credat Judæus Apella!). I was not very much pleased at this account of Hume, for I had just been reading, with infinite relish, that completest of all metaphysical choke-pears, his Treatise on Human Nature, to which the Essays, in point of scholastic subtlety and close reasoning, are mere elegant trifling, light summer-reading. Coleridge even denied the excellence of Hume’s general style, which I think betrayed a want of taste or candour. He however made me amends by the manner in which he spoke of Berkeley. He dwelt particularly on his Essay on Vision as a masterpiece of analytical reasoning. So it undoubtedly is. (Wu, ix, 101)31 In fairness to Coleridge, it may be that he did not realize that Hazlitt was an atheist. After all, they had met in a Unitarian chapel, after which Coleridge had encountered Hazlitt’s family at the head of which was a Unitarian minister. Awestruck by his new mentor, Hazlitt might not have wished to reveal that he did not share his religious views – though any such misconception would have been dispelled in May. Hazlitt seems to imply that Coleridge had not read Hume’s Treatise, but that may be indicative merely of how soured their relationship had become by 1823. It is likely that Coleridge had some idea of its contents, his disapproval of which stemmed in large part from Hume’s scepticism. Indeed, in a letter written only weeks after his visit to Wem, Coleridge described Hume’s philosophy as ‘the pillar, & confessedly, the sole pillar, of modern Atheism’.32 It was precisely for that reason that Hazlitt was attracted to it. His philosophy betokened a metropolitan sophistication symptomatic of the high-powered education enjoyed by graduates of the Unitarian academy at Hackney, of which atheism was an acknowledged by-product. Henry Crabb
The road to Nether Sowey 93 Robinson recalled that Hazlitt’s ‘first design was to be a dissenting minister and for that purpose he went to the Unitarian New College, Hackney, and he was one of the first students who left that college an avowed infidel’.33 Coleridge was aware of this, and probably had Hazlitt in mind when he told John Prior Estlin: ‘It may be very true, tha[t] at Hackney they learnt, too many of them, Infidelity’.34 Hazlitt attended the Academy for two years, leaving it shortly after his seventeenth birthday, declaring his intention not to enter the ministry. The following year it closed. The poetry Wordsworth composed at Alfoxden indicates that he occupied a different position from either Coleridge or Hazlitt. ‘The Recluse’ demanded, if not the Unitarian God, then at least the ‘living God’ encountered at epiphanic moments by the Pedlar: The clouds were touched, And in their silent faces did he read Unutterable love. Sound needed none, Nor any voice of joy: his spirit drank The spectacle. Sensation, soul, and form, All melted into him; they swallowed up His animal being. In them did he live, And by them did he live – they were his life. In such access of mind, in such high hour Of visitation from the living God, He did not feel the God, he felt his works. (‘The Pedlar’, ll. 99–109) It is not the deity who communicates directly with the Pedlar, but ‘his works’. That fastidiousness might be a whiff of what Coleridge considered Wordsworth’s semi-atheism, as he called it in a letter to John Thelwall of 1796.35 Two years later Wordsworth was more interested in the concept of a transcendentalized nature than in a deity whose existence was independent of it. It is a reminder that during his residence in London in 1795 he breakfasted with Godwin, some of whose atheism may have rubbed off on him.36 Incidentally, Godwin was a friend he had in common with Hazlitt, who had known him since boyhood, as Godwin’s father had immediately preceded the Revd William Hazlitt in his early charge at Wisbech. Were Hazlitt and Wordsworth aware of this? In January Coleridge had declared that he ‘did not rate Godwin very high’, but Hazlitt does not say whether Wordsworth commented on the metropolitan philosopher (Wu, ix, 99). In religious terms, one senses that in May 1798 Wordsworth was more sympathetic to Hazlitt than to Coleridge, a view supported by a dispute that took place five years later when Hazlitt visited the Lake District to paint their portraits. One afternoon they argued violently, Wordsworth and Hazlitt allying themselves as fellow-sceptics against Coleridge. In a notebook entry Coleridge described it as ‘A most unpleasant Dispute’ in which ‘I spoke, I
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fear too contemptuously – but they spoke so irreverently so malignantly of the Divine Wisdom, that it overset me’.37 Could it be that the seeds of that ‘Dispute’ had been sown at Alfoxden, and that at that early moment Wordsworth felt more kinship with Hazlitt for his irreligion than with Coleridge for his Unitarian faith? If so, they were probably not in agreement; in its crudest terms Hazlitt was an atheist and Wordsworth a deist. What matters to the Pedlar is a mediated presence, the ‘living’ power communicated through the natural world. Such mysticism stems from Coleridge, who in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ had developed it to the point where it could be readily adapted for use in ‘The Pedlar’ and ‘Not Useless do I Deem’ six months later. Hazlitt would have recognized that those works (had he seen them) did not aspire to the religious certainty of Coleridge’s poem, where Berkleyan vision enabled its author to see ‘such hues / As cloathe the Almighty Spirit, when he makes / Spirits perceive His presence!’38 Wordsworth was less concerned to bear out the tenets of Christian theism. That was why his poetry would appeal to a wide spectrum of readers that included such atheists as Percy Bysshe Shelley, who would admire ‘Tintern Abbey’ for its refusal to name God as the ‘presence’ that disturbs the poet ‘with the joy / Of elevated thoughts’. Perhaps the ‘metaphysical argument’ that took place on the road to Nether Stowey was not, in the end, that much of an argument, at least not in the sense that it centred on philosophy. Hazlitt’s suggestion that he failed to make himself ‘perfectly clear and intelligible’ may be justified, or a rare moment of retrospective gallantry, but it is more likely that Wordsworth and Coleridge understood all too well that they were up against an intellect they could not outmanoeuvre. The essential religious and philosophical differences between them were symptomatic of their different backgrounds and situations. Coleridge had helped Wordsworth concoct a philosophical scheme for a poem that did no violence to his Unitarian God while turning nature into a vehicle for the application of his powers in the human world. Though ingenious, it was a compromise in the sense that it permitted Wordsworth effectively to substitute a faith in Coleridge’s God for one in Nature. That strategy would allow Coleridge to claim the resulting poem as an endorsement of Unitarianism, even though the surviving fragments of 1798 are most persuasive, not when discussing the operations of a God in which Wordsworth did not really believe, but when describing the mystic perception of the natural world (in which he did). ‘In all shapes’, Wordsworth wrote of the Pedlar, ‘He found a secret and mysterious soul, / A fragrance and a spirit of strange meaning’.39 This would be of little advantage to the philosophical mission of ‘The Recluse’. For someone as well schooled in metaphysics as Hazlitt, it would have taken some restraint not to point that out, or observe that its mysticism – the component least susceptible to explication – exposed shortcomings in its theoretical underpinnings. My guess is that Hazlitt said something of the kind or he would not have been represented in ‘Expostulation and Reply’
The road to Nether Sowey 95 and ‘The Tables Turned’ as receptive only to ‘the lore which nature brings’ but to ‘the spirit breath’d / From dead men to their kind’. The impression is that his bookishness, antithetical to ‘The Recluse’, is effaced by the restatement of its principles: ‘Come forth, and bring with you a heart / That watches and receives’.40 Though great poems, it is doubtful whether in philosophical terms they provide a response to the metaphysical arguments Hazlitt offered. Had he said so, the likely outrage of its only begetters would have provided another reason for not mentioning ‘The Recluse’ in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’. By the time Wordsworth was resident at Goslar in October 1798, he might be expected to have set aside whatever irritation Hazlitt had caused during the early summer. But as he settled down to work on ‘The Recluse’, their exchanges continued to haunt him. The numerous blank verse fragments composed at Goslar include two extended versions of what was to become ‘Nutting’, probably intended for ‘The Recluse’. The first begins by discussing Wordsworth’s childhood love of nature which was so intense he ‘would not strike a flower / As many a man will strike his horse’; he was returning to the instruction of ‘The Tables Turned’ to cultivate sensitivity to the natural world. For, seeing little worthy or sublime In what we blazon with the pompous names Of power and action, I was early taught To love those unassuming things that fill A silent station in this beauteous world.41 The criticism of power and action as ‘pompous names’ might in theory have any number of referents – except that the pairing of the two suggests a specific context. They were the cornerstones of the philosophy Wordsworth had previously dismissed as ‘what every shoemaker must have thought of’. Power for Hazlitt, as Uttara Natarajan describes it, is the identifying attribute of the mind and is innate; its characteristic is activity. Throughout his work, Hazlitt makes free and recurrent use of the term in various contexts, but always with this twofold sense, of innateness and activity, constant in, and inseparable from, his usage.42 As Natarajan observes, power and action lie ‘at the heart of his metaphysics’.43 If as he later recalled he did explain ‘the argument of that Essay to Mr Wordsworth’, the poet can have been left in no doubt of this. He would have understood that (in Hazlitt’s view) instead of arguing that sensory impressions compelled the individual first to love nature and then his fellow man, he should regard human beings as dependent on the will to action – ‘power’. By dismissing power and action as ‘pompous names’ blazoned by certain people as ‘worthy or sublime’ Wordsworth rejected Hazlitt’s theories in an
96 Duncan Wu extended critique of those preoccupied with ‘power and action’ at the expense of ‘this beauteous world’. Their conversations had taken place in late May and early June, since when Wordsworth had no further contact with Hazlitt of which we are aware. Four months later, as he begins work on ‘The Recluse’ in a small market town in central Germany, he remains preoccupied with the need to persuade himself of the redundancy of Hazlitt’s theory – which suggests that he knew Hazlitt’s philosophy to be more credible than his own. Even when, in ‘I would not strike a flower’, Wordsworth writes of those who resist nature as ‘ye who judging rashly deem that such / Are idle sympathies, the toys of one / More curious than need is’, it is likely that the sceptical Hazlitt is in his mind.44 Of all his acquaintance, Hazlitt is the only one who we can be sure expressed doubt as to whether nature was truly the redemptive force ‘The Recluse’ was determined to claim. Were these speculations, none of which are mentioned in ‘My First Acquaintance’, to have any bearing on what took place on Hazlitt’s visit to Alfoxden and Nether Stowey in May–June 1798, they would explain a good deal about subsequent relations between the protagonists. For one thing, they ratify Wordsworth’s comment to Hazlitt’s son, shortly after Hazlitt’s death, that in 1798 he ‘was then remarkable for analytical power, and for acuteness and originality of mind’.45 That testimonial was genuine, and looked back to their discussions in Somerset. As far as Hazlitt is concerned, it is significant that he was one of the few to understand what ‘The Recluse’ was intended to have been at its inception in 1798. He may have read ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’ at Alfoxden, and as he reviewed The Excursion in 1814 would have realized the extent to which it fell short of its author’s early ambitions, for all its qualities. He would also have recognized the extent to which a handsome quarto volume bearing a dedicatory sonnet to the Tory Peer Lord Lonsdale exemplified its author’s abandonment of radical politics. In Hazlitt’s eyes, Coleridge was the worse culprit, because his failure to live up to the aspirations and ideals of the 1790s was greater. In a cancelled manuscript note to his Lectures on the English Poets, Hazlitt described Coleridge as ‘the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius’ (Wu, ii, 379). But, as he put it in The Spirit of the Age, What is become of all this mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning, and humanity? It has ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in the Courier. – Such, and so little is the mind of man. (Wu, vii, 103) These remarks have never been placed within their correct context. Hazlitt was one of the few who had known Coleridge and Wordsworth at the moment they were jointly proposing ‘The Recluse’, a poem that aimed at
The road to Nether Sowey 97 similar ends to the French Revolution, through a necessitarian scheme by which nature (rather than God) would have a morally improving effect on humanity. Hazlitt understood this better than anyone else – better than Charles Lamb, Thomas Poole, or any of the various correspondents to whom news of ‘The Recluse’ was given at the time – for the simple reason that he was the only person of their acquaintance qualified to assess its philosophical aims and dispute them, a process that may have taken some considerable time. But time was at their disposal – three weeks of it, much of which is unaccounted for in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’. He had argued over the philosophy of ‘The Recluse’ at the moment when Wordsworth and Coleridge were most confident of it, and would assess their subsequent work in its light. More than anyone else, he earned the right to judge its noncompletion as a measure of their failure. It was a unique perspective. That was why, as he concluded the Round Table text of his review of The Excursion, he declared that he (unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge) would not be prevented from returning on the wings of imagination to that bright dream of our youth; that glad dawn of the day-star of liberty; that spring-time of the world, in which the hopes and expectations of the human race seemed opening in the same gay career with our own; when France called her children to partake her equal blessings beneath her laughing skies; when the stranger was met in all her villages with dance and festive songs, in celebration of a new and golden era; and when, to the retired and contemplative student, the prospects of human happiness and glory were seen ascending like the steps of Jacob’s ladder, in bright and never-ending succession. The dawn of that day was suddenly overcast; that season of hope is past; it is fled with the other dreams of our youth, which we cannot recal, but has left behind it traces, which are not to be effaced by Birth-day and Thanks-giving odes, or the chaunting of Te Deums in all the churches of Christendom. To those hopes eternal regrets are due; to those who maliciously and wilfully blasted them, in the fear that they might be accomplished, we feel no less what we owe – hatred and scorn as lasting! (Wu, ii, 120)
7
One Impulse Hazlitt, Wordsworth and The Principles of Human Action Tom Paulin
According to the philosophers Raymond Martin and John Barresi, Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action is one of those books whose insights and perspectives were so far ahead of its own times ‘that they drop through the cracks of history’.1 Martin and Barresi argue that had Hazlitt’s views on personal identity received the attention they deserved, the philosophical discussion of personal identity ‘may well have leaped ahead 150 years, while the psychological discussion of the subject would also have been significantly advanced’.2 Stating that Hazlitt’s views did not receive that attention, they note that Keats’s idea of ‘negative capability’ was based on a careful study of Hazlitt’s Essay, that Coleridge mentioned the Essay once briefly, and that the jurist Sir James Mackintosh remarked in a footnote to his discussion of Butler in the seventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that the Essay is a ‘very able work’ which contains ‘original views’. David Bromwich and Uttara Natarajan have discussed Hazlitt’s influence on Keats, but it is his creative dialogue with Wordsworth and to some extent, his impact on De Quincey, which I would like to consider. The key passage, I think, is a very long footnote early in the Essay, a footnote which deserves to be quoted in its entirety. It is a miniature essay in itself. Discussing the difference between children’s ability to sympathize with others and that of adults, Hazlitt adds this note: The general clue to that ænigma, the character of the French, seems to be that their feelings are very imperfectly modified by the objects exciting them. That is, the difference between the several degrees and kinds of feeling in them does not correspond as much as it does in most other people with the different degrees and kinds of power in the external objects. They want neither feeling nor ideas in the abstract; but there seems to be no connection in their minds between the one and the other. Consequently their feelings want compass and variety, and whatever else must depend on the ‘building up of our feelings through the imagination’. The feelings of a Frenchman seem to be all one feeling. The moment any thing produces a change in him, he is thrown completely out of his character, he is quite beside himself. This is
One impulse 99 perhaps in a great measure owing to their quickness of perception. They do not give the object time to be thoroughly impressed on their minds, their feelings are roused at the first notice of its approach, and if I may so express myself, fairly runs away from the object. Their feelings do not grapple with the object. The least stimulus is sufficient to excite them and more is superfluous, for they do not wait for the impression, or stop to inquire what degree or kind it is of. There is not resistance sufficient in the matter to receive those sharp incisions, those deep, marked, and strongly rooted impressions, the traces of which remain for ever. From whatever cause it proceeds, the sensitive principle in them does not seem to be susceptible of the same modification and variety of action as it does in others; and certainly the outward forms of things do not adhere to, do not wind themselves round their feelings in the same manner. For any thing that appears to the contrary, objects might be supposed to have no direct communication with the internal sense of pleasure or pain, but to act upon it through some intermediate, very confined organ, capable of transmitting little more than the simple impulse. But the same thing will follow, if we suppose the principle itself to be this very organ, that is, to want comprehensiveness, elasticity, and plastic force. (It is difficult to express this in English: but there is a French word, ressort, which expresses it exactly. This is possibly owing to their feeling the want of it; as there is no word in any other language to answer to the English word, comfort, I suppose, because the English are the most uncomfortable of all people). It will rather follow from what has been here said than be inconsistent with it that the French must be more sensible of minute impressions and slight shades of difference in their feelings than others, because having, as is here supposed, less real variety, a narrower range of feeling, they will attend more to the differences contained within that narrow circle, and so produce an artificial variety. In short their feelings are very easily set in motion and by slight causes, but they do not go the whole length of the impression, nor are they capable of combining a great variety of complicated actions to correspond with the distinct characters and complex forms of things. Hence they have no such thing as poetry. This however must not be misunderstood. I mean then that I never met with any thing in French that produces the same kind of feeling in the mind as the following passage. If there is any thing that belongs even to the same class with it, I am ready to give the point up. ANTONY. EROS . ANT .
Eros thou yet behold’st me. Ay, noble Lord. Sometimes we see a cloud that’s Dragonish, A vapour sometimes like a Bear, or Lion, A tower’d Citadel, a pendant Rock, A forked Mountain, or blue Promontory
100 Tom Paulin
EROS. ANT.
EROS. ANT.
With Trees upon’t, that nod unto the World And mock our Eyes with Air. Thou hast seen these Signs, They are black Vesper’s Pageants. Ay, my Lord. That which is now a Horse, even with a Thought The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct As Water is in Water. It does, my Lord. My good Knave, Eros, now thy Captain is Even such a body, &c.
It is remarkable that the French, who are a lively people and fond of shew and striking images, should be able to read and hear with such delight their own dramatic pieces, which abound in nothing but general maxims, and vague declamation, never embodying any thing, and which would appear quite tedious to an English audience, who are generally considered as a dry, dull, plodding people, much more likely to be satisfied with formal descriptions and grave reflections. This appears to me to come to the same thing that I have said before, namely, that it is characteristic of the French that their feelings let go their hold of things almost as soon as the impression is made. Except sensible impressions therefore (which have on that account more force, and carry them away without opposition while they last) all their feelings are general; and being general, not being marked by any strong distinctions nor built on any deep foundation of inveterate associations, one thing serves to excite them as well as another, the name of the general class to which any feeling belongs, the words pleasure, charming, delicious, &c., convey just the same meaning, and excite the same kind of emotion in the mind of a Frenchman, and at the same time do this more readily than the most forcible description of real feelings, and objects. The English on the contrary are not so easily moved with words because being in the habit of retaining individual images and of brooding over the feelings connected with them, the mere names of general classes, or (which is the same thing) vague and unmeaning descriptions or sentiments must appear perfectly indifferent to them. Hence the French are delighted with Racine, the English (I mean some of them) admire Shakespear. Rousseau is the only French writer I am acquainted with (though he by the bye was not a Frenchman) who from the depth of his feelings, without many distinct images, produces the same kind of interest in the mind that is excited by the events and recollections of our own lives. If he had not true genius, he had at least something which was a very good substitute for it. The French generalise perpetually, but seldom comprehensively: they make an infinite number of observations, but have never discovered any great principle. They immediately
One impulse 101 perceive the analogy between a number of facts of the same class, and make a general inference, which is done the more easily, the fewer particulars you trouble yourself with; it is in a good measure the art of forgetting. The difficult part of philosophy is, when a number of particular observations and contradictory facts have been stated, to reconcile them together by finding out some other distinct view of the subject, or collateral circumstance, applicable to all the different facts or appearances, which is the true principle from which, when combined with particular circumstances, they are all derived. Opposite appearances are always immediately incompatible with each other, and cannot therefore be deduced from the same immediate cause, but must be accounted for from a combination of different causes, the discovery of which is an affair of comprehension, and not of mere abstraction. (Wu, i, 23–6)3 When Hazlitt says early in the footnote that the French people’s feelings lack ‘compass and variety’, and whatever else that must depend on the ‘building up of our feelings through imagination’, this, I would guess, made-up quotation, anticipates a later moment in the Essay’s appendix, Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius, where he says ‘association alone does not account either for the proper operations of the understanding, or for our moral feelings, and voluntary actions, or that there are other general, original, independent faculties’, which are equally necessary and important in the ‘building up of the human mind’ (Wu, i, 62). As Duncan Wu points out in his edition of the Essay, ‘the building up of the human mind’ is a misremembered quotation from the Two-Part Prelude: Ah, not in vain ye beings of the hills, And ye that walk the woods and open heaths By moon or star-light, thus, from my first dawn Of childhood, did ye love to intertwine The passions that build up our human soul. (Part 1, ll. 130–4)4 Hazlitt read the Two-Part Prelude when he was staying in Keswick and Grasmere in 1803, where he painted what Coleridge called ‘masterly’ portraits of himself and Wordsworth (Duncan Wu in his essay discusses in detail Hazlitt’s relationship with Wordsworth at this period). Hazlitt’s criticism of the French character and intellect is a pervasive theme in his writings, and here he begins by suggesting that for the French feelings are homogeneous. Their feelings are instantaneous and superficial, and do not ‘grapple’ with external objects. Interestingly, Hazlitt also uses the word ‘grapple’ in his essay ‘On the Prose-Style of Poets’, where he says, in a kind of prose rhyming couplet, ‘Every word should be a blow: every thought should instantly grapple with its fellow’ (Wu, viii, 8). In his earlier
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use of the verb, he is beginning to formulate a concept that Hardy was to term a ‘permanent impression’,5 and which Hazlitt outlines in this sentence from the footnote quoted above: There is not resistance sufficient in the matter to receive those sharp incisions, those deep, marked, and strongly rooted impressions, the traces of which remain for ever. (Wu, i, 23) This is similar to Wordsworth’s concept of ‘spots of time’ (Part 1, l. 288) in the Two-Part Prelude, and it opposes the transitory and fugitive nature of sense impressions in Locke’s epistemology. In order to give substance and solidity to both emotions and impressions Hazlitt uses a series of metaphors: ‘grapple’, ‘incisions’, ‘rooted’. The word ‘resistance’, which is taken from philosophy and electrical theory is also, at least partly, metaphoric. This is developed later in Hazlitt’s remarks on Hartley, where he says: Suppose association to depend on the actual juxtaposition of two, or more local impressions which being thus accidentally brought together have thrown a sort of grappling irons over one another, and continue to act in concert in consequence of this immediate local communication. (Wu, i, 60) Again we see that the ‘sort of grappling irons’ link separate impressions together, and so refute their distinctions; for Hazlitt, Hartley’s theory is untenable because it cannot sustain such a link. By at least association, this image of grappling irons calls up this passage from the Two-Part Prelude: Twilight was coming on, yet through the gloom I saw distinctly on the opposite shore, Beneath a tree and close by the lake side, A heap of garments, as if left by one Who there was bathing. Half an hour I watched And no one owned them; meanwhile the calm lake Grew dark with all the shadows on its breast, And now and then a leaping fish disturbed The breathless stillness. The succeeding day There came a company, and in their boat Sounded with iron hooks and with long poles. At length the dead man, ‘mid that beauteous scene Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright Rose with his ghastly face. (Part 1, ll. 266–79)
One impulse 103 Wordsworth is remembering a spot of time or permanent impression here, which the human effort of the iron hooks does so much to enforce. Interestingly, Wordsworth reworked these lines in the later Prelude, where the company ‘in their Boat, / Sounded with grappling-irons, and long poles’.6 It is as if, in discussion with Hazlitt, the idea of separate impressions being linked together with grappling irons, has made Wordsworth slightly change ‘iron hooks’ in order to underline the fact that he is thinking of the way impressions can take on a type of resilient, springy force. And though he later cut this passage from the poem, it is clear that this was a permanent impression, a significant spot of time for Wordsworth. He also uses the philosophical term ‘impressed’, and in the link passage to the spots of time passage, he says: I might advert To numerous accidents in flood or field, Quarry or moor, or ‘mid the winter snows, Distresses and disasters, tragic facts Of rural history, that impressed my mind With images to which in following years Far other feelings were attached – with forms That yet exist with independent life, And, like their archetypes, know no decay. (Part 1, ll. 279–87) This passage, which has no counterpart in later versions of the Prelude, uses the term ‘impressed’ to point to the epistemological subject, while the word ‘decay’ immediately summons Hobbes’s famous definition of memory as decaying sense: For after the object is removed, or the eye shut, we still retain an image of the thing seen, though more obscure than when we see it. And this is it, the Latines call Imagination, from the image made in seeing, and apply the same, through improperly, to all the other senses. But the Greeks call it Fancy; which signifies apparence, and is as proper to one sense, as to another. IMAGINATION therefore is nothing but decaying sense: and is found in men, and many other living Creatures, as well sleeping, as waking.7 Wordsworth’s assertion of the independent life of certain memories is clearly pitched against Hobbes’s famous denial of the imagination. Such images are as permanent as their ‘archetypes’, which means the natural scenes from which they derive. This aims to refute Hobbes’s idea that the imagination is another term for the decaying sense of memory.
104 Tom Paulin Hazlitt uses a lively version of Hobbes’s idea in order to refute him, when he argues that the human mind is a ‘thinking principle’, and illustrates it with this image: Suppose a number of animalculæ as a heap of mites in a rotten cheese lying as close together as they can stick (though the example should be of something ‘more drossy and divisible,’ of something less reasonable, approaching nearer to pure sensation than we can conceive of any creature that exercises the functions of the meanest instinct). No one will contend that in this heap of living matter there is any idea of the number, position, or intricate involutions of that little, lively, restless tribe. (Wu, i, 63) Again we see that important word ‘involutions’, which must have caught De Quincey’s eye. Hazlitt argues that ‘this idea is evidently not contained in any of the parts separately, nor is it contained in all of them put together’ (Wu, i, 63). This is because the ‘aggregate’ of many actual sensations is: ‘a totally different thing from the collective idea, comprehension, or consciousness of those sensations as many things, or of any of their relations to each other’ (Wu, i, 63). We can go on ‘multiplying and combining’ sensations to the end of time, without ever advancing one step, ‘or producing a single thought’. This is similar to his criticism of Horne Tooke’s eloquence as a ‘succession of drops, not a stream’ (Wu, vii, 117). And as I have argued in The Day-Star of Liberty, Hazlitt’s criticism of Tooke echoes his criticism of Locke’s inability to frame a concept of the cementing power of the understanding: Without this faculty, all our ideas would be necessarily decomposed, and crumbled down into their original elements and fluxional parts … There would be an infinite divisibility in the impressions of the mind, as well as in the objects of matter. There would be a total want of union, fellowship, and mutual intelligence between them, for each impression must remain absolutely simple and distinct, unknown to, and unconscious of the rest, shut up in the narrow cell of its own individuality. No two of these atomic impressions could ever club together to form even a sensible point. (ii, 152) Developing the idea of uselessly multiplying sensations, he then asks how this supposition differs from that of ‘many distinct particles of matter, full of animation, tumbling about, and pressing against each other in the same brain’ (Wu, i, 63). He answers that we make use of this brain as a common medium to write ‘their desultory actions’ in the ‘same general principle of thought, or consciousness’. In a clear refutation of Locke’s image of the brain as a camera obscura, he says:
One impulse 105 … if there is no power in this principle but to repeat the old story of sensation over again, if the mind is but a sort of inner room where the images of external things like pictures in a gallery are lodged safe, and dry out of the reach of the turbulence of the senses, but remaining as distinct from, and if I may so say as perfectly unknown to one another as the pictures on a wall, there being no general faculty to overlook and give notice of their several impressions, this medium is without any use, the hypothesis is so far an incumbrance, not an advantage. (Wu, i, 63) The way in which this ‘general principle’ operates is by a series of images in Wordsworth and Hazlitt of winding, involution and interfusion. The distinction Wordsworth makes between the ‘large drops’ which drip from the ‘shuddering ivy’ (Part 2, l. 126) and the sweet song of the ‘single wren’ (Part 2, l. 121) – a passage I shall discuss later – is a version of Hazlitt’s distinction between this general principle and the endlessly multiplying mites in a rotten cheese. The interfusion of emotion and object – that ‘something far more deeply interfused’ in the, for Hazlitt, seminal ‘Tintern Abbey’ – is present in the next sentence of the footnote, where he says that the ‘outward forms of things’ do not ‘wind themselves’ round the feelings of the French in the same manner as ‘others’ (he means of course the English). Finding it difficult to express this principle of ‘comprehensiveness, elasticity and plastic force’, he turns to French for the word ‘ressort’, which means ‘spring, resilience, impulse, motivation, province, responsibility, resort’. The French have invented the word possibly because they feel ‘the want of it’ just as the English, the most uncomfortable of people, have invented the word ‘comfort’, for which there is ‘no word in any other language’. In French, there is a ‘ressort spiral,’ which means a ‘spiral spring’. This pattern of imagery, and the idea of a sharply incised, permanent impression, is very similar to a famous moment in De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis, where he remembers going up to his sister’s room on the day after she died: I imagine that it was exactly high noon when I reached the chamber door; it was locked; but the key was not taken away. Entering, I closed the door so softly, that, although it opened upon a hall which ascended through all the stories, no echo ran along the silent walls. Then turning round, I sought my sister’s face. But the bed had been moved; and the back was now turned. Nothing met my eyes but one large window wide open, through which the sun of midsummer at noonday was showering down torrents of splendour. The weather was dry, the sky was cloudless, the blue depths seemed the express types of infinity; and it was not possible for eye to behold or for heart to conceive any symbols more pathetic of life and the glory of life.8
106 Tom Paulin Recollecting this traumatic experience, De Quincey says that he has often been struck by this important truth: … that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly, and in their own abstract shapes.9 Emotions are combined and perplexed with concrete objects just as they are for Hazlitt, who also makes a distinction between the concrete and the abstract, and who, as I say, uses the idea of involution to represent the spiralling, springy resilience of certain permanent impressions. But there is a further connection between the two writers, who were fierce enemies. Hazlitt states that the French lack poetry, and says that he has never read the equivalent in French of the passage of dialogue he quotes from Antony and Cleopatra. De Quincey takes up ‘dislimn’ from that passage later in Suspiria, when he says that faces ‘begin soon (in Shakespeare’s fine expression) to “dislimn”’.10 He uses it both to display his knowledge of Shakespeare, and to create a kind of phantasmagoric, magic-lantern effect. Although De Quincey knew Shakespeare well, I think he took the term ‘dislimn’ from Hazlitt’s citation of Antony and Cleopatra, because it expressed a particularly English emotional concreteness, with a melting, insubstantial effect, which he needed in order to enforce a type of passive spectatorship in his readers. He may, though, have taken it from Hazlitt’s essay on Antony and Cleopatra, which was published in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817). In his essay, Hazlitt quotes the same passage of dialogue between Eros and Antony that he quotes in the long footnote in Principles of Human Action. He observes of it in his essay on Antony and Cleopatra: This is, without doubt, one of the finest pieces of poetry in Shakespeare. The splendour of the imagery, the semblance of reality, the lofty range of picturesque objects hanging over the world, their evanescent nature, the total uncertainty of what is left behind, are just like the mouldering schemes of human greatness. It is finer than Cleopatra’s passionate lamentation over his fallen grandeur, because it is more dim, unstable, unsubstantial. (iv, 231) This means that when he quotes Antony’s three crucial lines, where the rack dislimns, in his essay on Coleridge in The Spirit of the Age, Antony’s fallen greatness is a figure for Coleridge’s heroic intellectual failure: Mr Coleridge has ‘a mind reflecting ages past’: his voice is like the echo of the congregated roar of the ‘dark rearward and abyss’ of thought. He who has seen a mouldering tower by the side of a chrystal lake, hid by the
One impulse 107 mist, but glittering in the wave below, may conceive the dim, gleaming, uncertain intelligence of his eye: he who has marked the evening clouds uprolled (a world of vapours), has seen the picture of his mind, unearthly, unsubstantial, with gorgeous tints and ever-varying forms – That which was now a horse, even with a thought The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct As water is in water. (Wu, vii, 98) Hazlitt takes the adjective ‘unsubstantial’ from his discussion of Antony’s ‘fallen grandeur’, and applies it to Coleridge. De Quincey probably took ‘dislimn’ from the essay on Antony and Cleopatra, but he may have taken it from its later appearance in The Spirit of the Age (there is of course the chance that he found it in the Essay on the Principles of Human Action, perhaps in the copy Hazlitt gave Wordsworth). On the other hand, De Quincey may simply have read it in Shakespeare, but it is the philosophical application in the Essay, which makes it more than a direct quotation. De Quincey had stolen from Hazlitt already, because as Hazlitt pointed out in a letter to the London Magazine, there was ‘rather a striking coincidence’ between his criticism of Malthus and a short essay, published in the October issue of the magazine, which criticized Malthus’s Essay on Population.11 Tracing the ‘dislimn’ quotation back to its original appearance in Hazlitt’s Essay, we can see that it praises as well as criticizes Coleridge, and implies that his mind is truly English, not French, even though it is shifty and indistinct. If De Quincey took ‘dislimn’ from this passage in Hazlitt, it would have carried a Coleridgean resonance and authority. For Hazlitt, as he says in his lengthy footnote, the French mind is general, abstract, declamatory, like French poetry: feelings are not built ‘on any deep foundation of inveterate associations’. The resilience of these impressions is expressed for Hazlitt in the image of a winding spring, an image he uses later in his essay, when he says that the mind that ‘is in man’, which is the centre in which all his thoughts meet, is the ‘master-spring by which all his actions are governed’ (Wu, i, 66). Here Hazlitt is drawing on Cowper’s The Task: The slope of faces, from the floor to th’ roof, (As if one master-spring controul’d them all) Relax’d into an universal grin.12 Wordsworth adapts Cowper, and anticipates Hazlitt, when he writes in the Immortality Ode (1802–4):
108
Tom Paulin those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing.13
The philosophical idealism, which both writers share, is given concrete, empirical embodiment – ‘master-spring’, ‘fountain-light’, ‘master-light’ – which insists that it is not simply abstract and intangibly a priori. Similarly, when Hazlitt says that if we suppose the principle to lack ‘comprehensiveness, elasticity and plastic force’, and when he speaks of ‘the actual juxtaposition of two, or more local impressions’, Wordsworth says: A plastic power Abode with me, a forming hand, at times Rebellious, acting in a devious mood, A local spirit of its own, at war With general tendency, but for the most Subservient strictly to the external things With which it communed. An auxiliary light Came from my mind, which on the setting sun Bestowed new splendour; the melodious birds, The gentle breezes, fountains that ran on Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed A like dominion, and the midnight storm Grew darker in the presence of my eye. Hence my obeisance, my devotion hence, And hence my transport. (Part 2, ll. 411–24) Again, note that this plastic power is ‘at war / With general tendency’, another echo perhaps of a conversation with nineteen-year-old Hazlitt, whom Wordsworth met in 1798. When Hazlitt says in the footnote of the French: ‘all their feelings are general, and being general, not being marked by any strong distinctions’, he is setting the local and ‘inveterate’ association against the abstract and general. Again, the word ‘inveterate’ resembles ‘rebellious’ in its sense of a determined and recalcitrant and rooted principle. When Hazlitt says ‘Everything is one in nature and is governed by an absolute impulse’, he anticipates the famous moment in ‘The Tables Turned’, when Wordsworth turns on the teenage philosopher and says, One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.14
One impulse 109 But it is clear, I think, that he did influence Wordsworth, and this shows in the most beautiful sentence in the Essay, in the Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius, where Hazlitt is refuting Hartley’s idea of vibrations: If from the top of a long cold barren hill I hear the distant whistle of a thrush which seems to come up from some warm woody shelter beyond the edge of the hill, this sound coming faint over the rocks with a mingled feeling of strangeness and joy, the idea of the place about me, and the imaginary one beyond will all be combined together in such a manner in my mind as to become inseparable. (Wu, i, 51) Notice the idea of everything being ‘mingled’ and ‘combined’ – this is the involution of sensations and impressions, an involution that is enforced by the ih sound that begins with ‘If’ and ends with ‘inseparable’. The i sound in ‘I’, ‘idea’ and ‘combined’ works to underline the passage’s idealism. There is also a parallel between that sentence in the Essay and the single wren passage in the Two-Part Prelude: Our steeds remounted, and the summons given, With whip and spur we by the chantry flew In uncouth race, and left the cross-legged knight And the stone abbot, and that single wren Which one day sang so sweetly in the nave Of the old church that, though from recent showers The earth was comfortless, and, touched by faint Internal breezes, from the roofless walls The shuddering ivy dripped large drops, yet still So sweetly ‘mid the gloom the invisible bird Sang to itself that there I could have made My dwelling place, and lived for ever there, To hear such music. (Part 2, ll. 118–30) A protestant guilt about the destruction of abbeys during the sixteenth century – and the murders of monks and priests – also acts in the line where the ‘shuddering ivy dripped large drops’ as a memory of the September Massacres. But those large drops are also sense impressions, which the sweet song of the single wren rises above, like the absolute impulse which, Hazlitt says, governs the oneness of nature. Behind both passages stands Milton’s nightingale, so that the birds symbolize the plastic, ideal power of inspiration. In a passage which reverses Lucio’s ‘The wanton stings and motions of the sense’ (Measure for Measure, 1.4.59), Wordsworth insists on the purity of what looks like a sixth sense:
110
Tom Paulin Nor, sedulous as I have been to trace How Nature by collateral interest, And by extrinsic passion, peopled first My mind with forms or beautiful or grand, And made me love them, may I well forget How other pleasures have been mine, and joys Of subtler origin – how I have felt Not seldom, even in that tempestuous time, Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense Which seem in their simplicity to own An intellectual charm, that calm delight Which, if I err not, surely must belong To those first-born affinities that fit Our new existence to existing things, And, in our dawn of being, constitute The bond of union betwixt life and joy. (Part 1, ll. 375–90)
Hazlitt talks about – and draws on – the same speech in Measure for Measure, when in his Letter to William Gifford, he says: The present moment stands on the brink of nothing. We cannot pass the dread abyss, or make a broad and beaten way over it, or construct a real interest in it, or identify ourselves with what is not, or have a being, sense, and motion, where there are none. (Wu, v, 382) Here, Hazlitt is repeating the argument of the Essay that we cannot have an interest in our future selves. Although there are other sources for his image of the chamois in his late essay ‘On The Prose Style of Poets’, this passage from the Two-Part Prelude may have informed it: Yet is a path More difficult before me, and I fear That in its broken windings we shall need The chamois’ sinews and the eagle’s wing. For now a trouble came into my mind From obscure causes: I was left alone Seeking this visible world, nor knowing why. The props of my affections were removed, And yet the building stood, as if sustained By its own spirit. (Part 2, ll. 317–26)
One impulse 111 In his seminal essay on prose style, Hazlitt says that Burke’s style differs from poetry, like the chamois from the eagle: it climbs to an almost equal height, touches upon a cloud, overlooks a precipice, is picturesque, sublime – but all the while, instead of soaring through the air, it stands upon a rocky cliff, clambers up by abrupt and intricate ways, and browzes upon roughest bark, or crops the tender flower. (Wu, viii, 7) The common image makes the chamois a figure for that inveterate principle, which shapes perception. The chamois is a ‘local creature’, and its sinews have ressort, so that it becomes a figure, not just for the energy of Burke’s prose style, but for the elastic resilience of the human mind. What that mind possesses, according to Hazlitt, and here he draws strongly on Francis Hutcheson, is disinterestedness. Early in the Essay, he says that he has attempted to show by a ‘logical deduction’ that the human mind is ‘naturally disinterested’. This central philosophic idea has also a wide social and civic application, as is demonstrated by Hazlitt’s next major work, The Eloquence of the British Senate, which was published in 1807 and which has also been largely ignored. In my view there is a development from the Essay to The Eloquence of the British Senate, which shows how Hazlitt saw English liberty as attached to, or cognate with, the concept of disinterestedness. Wordsworth’s idea of what in the Prelude he terms ‘mountain liberty’ must owe something to his conversations and discussions with the young, but very learned, Hazlitt, who, through his family, was the product of an established and vigorous dissenting culture. Compared with Hazlitt, Wordsworth and Coleridge were mere temporary fellow-travellers in the ranks of dissent – Hazlitt carried the torch of that religious and civic faith, and he knew, as no Anglican ever could, its communal suffering and its heroism. I believe he deepened and extended Wordsworth’s idea of liberty, and I think, too, that his concept of ‘strongly rooted impressions’ gave Wordsworth the image and idea of ‘spots of time’. We have for too long allowed Wordsworth and Coleridge to overshadow or occlude Hazlitt’s genius, and it is for new generations of readers and scholars to restore him to his rightful place as philosopher, master critic, political journalist and unequalled prose stylist.
8
Circle of Sympathy Shelley’s Hazlitt Uttara Natarajan
This essay will attempt to assess Hazlitt’s influence on the development of Shelley’s moral philosophy. Shelley’s acquaintance with Hazlitt dates to early 1817, when Leigh Hunt brought them together, thereafter, Hazlitt met Shelley on several occasions at Hunt’s cottage in Hampstead. Their shared political interests were manifest; Charles Cowden Clarke recollects an occasion at Hunt’s where there took place ‘a very warm argument in favour of the Monarchy upheld by Leigh Hunt and Coulson, and in favour of Republicanism by Shelley and Hazlitt’.1 Mary Shelley’s journal entry for 9 February 1817 also records the occasion, a supper at Hunt’s and ‘after Supper a discussion until 3 in the morning with Hazlitt concerning monarchy & republicanism’.2 The acquaintance never developed. Hazlitt and Shelley ceased to be in contact after May 1817, and Hazlitt’s subsequent notice of Shelley in the first volume of Table-Talk (1821) as having ‘a fever in his blood’ and ‘a maggot in his brain’ was not calculated to sustain a mutual regard (viii, 148). But the connection that was established in 1817 was kept up by Hunt in the years afterwards, in his association of Hazlitt’s name with Shelley in the Examiner (it is to Hazlitt’s attack on Gifford that Hunt refers so as to dismiss the Quarterly’s treatment of Shelley), in his mentions of Hazlitt in his letters to the Shelleys in Italy, and in his efforts at conciliation, following the TableTalk comments.3 Their common political ground remained in Shelley’s view, in Hazlitt’s contributions to The Examiner which Shelley continued to receive in Italy. As late as 1819, in his Philosophical View of Reform, Shelley lists Hazlitt with three other intellectuals, Godwin, Bentham, and Hunt, who might, under a new system, act as checks upon governmental oppression. And in his very last work, Shelley is still acknowledging Hazlitt: as James Mulvihill has convincingly established, the Car of Life image in The Triumph of Life owes not a little to Hazlitt’s image for Power in his ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper’, in an Examiner article of 12 January 1817 (vii, 147).4 The concurrence of their political principles should alert us to a more fundamental concurrence between Hazlitt and Shelley, of what is, for both, the ground of politics: moral philosophy. Hazlitt’s philosophical position is expounded most fully in his early metaphysical treatise, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), but gained its widest audience probably
Circle of sympathy 113 by means of the 1819 pamphlet, A Letter to William Gifford, which incorporates a lengthy summary of the Essay (the Essay itself was still available at this date).5 Shelley may well have become familiar with the Essay, either at first-hand, or in conversation at Hunt’s or Godwin’s; the publication of the Letter to William Gifford was brought to his notice by Hunt’s letters to him in Italy.6 The case for the impact of Hazlitt’s philosophy upon Shelley has already been made persuasively by P.M.S. Dawson in The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (1980).7 Dawson points out the likelihood of Shelley’s having become aware of Hazlitt’s Essay during the period of their acquaintance in 1817, and argues that the Essay would have provided Shelley with a way out of what would have been for him the dead end of Godwinian rationalism, that ‘the Reason that leads Godwin to derive altruism from self-interest could be nothing but a selfish principle’.8 Hazlitt’s Essay, by contrast, establishes that moral action is independent of self-interest, because it originates in the imagination, which takes us out of ourselves and into the feelings of others. Where action originates in the imagination rather than in direct sensory knowledge (our knowledge of ourselves), that action – moral action, benevolence, or disinterestedness – is not reducible to self-interest; it is genuinely altruistic, other-directed. The fact, as Dawson observes, ‘that Hazlitt assigned a crucial role to the imagination … could hardly have failed to excite a poet who also wished to be a moral and political reformer’.9 By Dawson’s showing, the argument of the Essay on the Principles of Human Action feeds into a key section of Shelley’s 1817 fragment on virtue, printed by Mary Shelley as part of his ‘Speculations on Morals’, and generally recognized as a preliminary stage in the working out of the moral position of the Defence. Dawson’s acknowledgement of Hazlitt’s influence upon Shelley makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing reassessment of Hazlitt, but it is not quite complete and perhaps not sufficiently emphatic. Thus Terence Hoagwood, in his Skepticism and Ideology (1988), is able summarily to dismiss Dawson’s argument: What Shelley might have read in Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action … or what he might have heard from Hazlitt in conversation at Leigh Hunt’s house, was one version of a more comprehensive argument that he had already encountered in Diogenes, in Cicero, and Hume. This older version in fact offers Shelley more than what he might have found in Hazlitt.10 Hoagwood’s dismissal necessitates, at the very least, further support for Dawson’s case. We might begin by making a little more than Dawson does of Shelley’s naming of Hazlitt in A Philosophical View of Reform, the most important of the antecedents of the Defence in Shelley’s prose, contributing substantially and in some passages, almost verbatim, to the later and betterknown work. Here, where ‘Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged
114 Uttara Natarajan legislators of the world’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 20; my italics), Shelley lists Hazlitt with Godwin, Bentham, and Hunt, among ‘those who already have a predestined existence among posterity’, and who might offer ‘solemn and emphatic argument’ regarding ‘the inevitable connection between national prosperity and freedom, and the cultivation of the imagination and the cultivation of scientific truth, and the profound development of moral and metaphysical enquiry’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 52).11 The assertion of Hazlitt’s permanent reputation is telling, as are the terms of Shelley’s context for Hazlitt. Three phrases in particular, ‘the cultivation of the imagination’, ‘moral and metaphysical enquiry’, ‘solemn and emphatic argument’, recall the metaphysical Hazlitt, the author of the Essay on the Principles of Human Action. Shelley’s remark, indicating Hazlitt’s importance to him in two key and associated areas, philosophy and reform, must add weight to the evidence of his reading of Hazlitt in the formulation of his own metaphysics in the 1817 fragments. Furthermore, that Hazlitt’s name follows Godwin’s on Shelley’s list suggests his pertinence to Shelley as a philosopher on another ground. Hazlitt’s philosophical standing would have been confirmed for Shelley by his association with Godwin, another of Shelley’s close connections who, independently of Hunt, is also connected with Hazlitt. Hazlitt is a regular visitor at Godwin’s, with whom his acquaintance dates as far back as 1794,12 and it is probably through Godwin’s good offices that the Essay is published in the first place.13 Hazlitt and Godwin are associated explicitly as philosophers – of language – in the joint publication in 1809, in a single volume, of Hazlitt’s New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue and Godwin’s New Guide to the English Tongue, both works of grammar that proclaim a philosophical purpose in their scrutiny and reform of language. We can locate, then, at least three philosophical contexts, philosophy of imagination, moral philosophy, and philosophy of language, for the reference to Hazlitt in the Philosophical View of Reform, all three of which are germane to the principles and content of Shelley’s poetics. It is possible too that Hazlitt’s association with Godwin brought him to Shelley’s notice considerably before the meeting at Hunt’s in 1817. Shelley is reading Godwin avidly from 1811; he initiates a correspondence with him in January 1812, and they meet for the first time that October. If, in this period of Shelley’s early idolization of Godwin, he came across the New Guide to the English Tongue, he would have come across Hazlitt’s name in association with it, and might thence have been led to Hazlitt’s Essay. In his Proposal for an Association of Philanthropists, published in March 1812, Shelley makes a point of the independence of virtue from self-interest, in a passage that has the ring of the Essay: The essence of virtue is disinterestedness. Disinterestedness is the quality which preserves the character of virtue distinct from that of
Circle of sympathy 115 either innocence or vice. … Those who have been convinced by their grandam of the doctrine of an original hereditary sin, or by the apostles of a degrading philosophy of the necessary and universal selfishness of man cannot be philanthropists. Now as an action, or a motive to action, is only virtuous so far as it is disinterested, or partakes (I adopt this mode of expression to suit the taste of some) of the nature of generalized self-love, then reward or punishment, attached even by omnipotence to any action, can in no wise make it either good or bad. (Ingpen and Peck, v, 263)14 The key word, ‘disinterestedness’, attached to the notion that morality is not a matter of calculation, makes it possible that Shelley has caught up, in this early comment on virtue, a phrase or two from the Essay: ‘there is the most love of virtue for it’s own sake, as we become truly disinterested’ (i, 6). When Shelley takes up the topic of virtue in the 1817 fragments, the parallels with Hazlitt multiply. A general theoretical correspondence between Shelley’s ‘Speculations on Morals’ and Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action has already been argued by Dawson. Such an argument gains considerably from the demonstration of a more specific correspondence that emerges when we seek out and align parallel passages in the two texts. For instance, here is Shelley’s account of the early experience of alterity: ‘If a child observes without emotion, its nurse or its mother suffering acute pain, it is attributable rather to ignorance than insensibility’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 75). In Hazlitt’s Essay, ‘A child is insensible to the good of others not from any want of goodwill towards them, or an exclusive attachment to self, but for want of knowing better’ (i, 12). Further on in the ‘Speculations’, where Shelley describes ‘Imagination or mind employed in prophetically [imaging forth] its objects’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 75), his word ‘prophetically’ exactly corresponds to the emphasis on futurity in Hazlitt’s account: ‘future objects act upon the mind by means of the imagination’ (i, 9). Laurence Lockridge has observed that a ‘difference between Wordsworthian and Shelleyan sensibility is the weak function of memory in the latter. Shelley … is prospective in vision’.15 If Shelley is at variance with Wordsworth in this regard, he is very much in accord with Hazlitt. Again, to Shelley, ‘disinterested benevolence is the product of a cultivated imagination’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 76), and in Hazlitt’s Essay, ‘a sentiment of general benevolence can only arise from an habitual cultivation … of the mind’ (i, 14). Shelley asserts ‘We are impelled to seek the happiness of others’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 77), where Hazlitt writes, ‘I am impelled to pursue the good of others’ (i, 42). For both, distinctively, the imagination acts without respect of person. In the ‘Speculations’, ‘We are led by our benevolent propensities to regard every human being indifferently with whom we come in contact. They have preference only with respect to those who offer themselves most obviously to our notice’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 77). In the Essay, ‘It is in proportioning our
116 Uttara Natarajan anxiety to promote the welfare of any[one] … to our sense of the use our assistance may be of … without respect of persons, that what may be called the natural balance of our affections seems to consist’ (i, 15–16). The juxtaposition of key passages and ideas taken from Shelley’s ‘Speculations on Morals’ and Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action highlights an extent of correspondence that is nearly impossible to ignore. Whether or not Shelley had a first-hand knowledge of the Essay, he follows Hazlitt in his formulation of the problem of alterity and of the imagination’s role in enabling moral action. As Hoagwood points out, the link between imagination and morals, whereby the imagination, enabling sympathy, enables benevolence or altruism, is made not only by Hazlitt, but also by Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) was well known to Shelley. Following Hume, that link is confirmed by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the reading of which is manifest in Hazlitt’s Essay (i, 24, 80). But whatever Hazlitt might owe to Hume or Smith, his argument is distinct from theirs in one important respect. The key factor in Hume’s (and Smith’s) argument for the imagination is contiguity, nearness, or resemblance; in Hazlitt’s, it is alterity. Hume’s imagination perceives likeness, Hazlitt’s conquers difference. The distinction I am making here is very much more than merely semantic, and deserves to be unravelled in some detail. To Hume, ‘sympathy … makes us partake of the satisfaction of every one, that approaches us’; ‘Every human creature resembles ourselves, and by that means has an advantage above any other object, in operating on the imagination’; ‘Our concern for our own interest gives us a pleasure in the pleasure, and a pain in the pain of a partner’.16 The origin of sympathy is imagination, which can conceive of others, because of their closeness to ourselves. The self is present most strongly to the imagination, others in proportion to their closeness to the self. Furthermore, The passage is smooth and open from the consideration of any person related to us to that of ourself, of whom we are every moment conscious. But when the affections are once directed to ourself, the fancy passes not with the same facility from that object to any other person, how closely so ever connected with us.17 Thus, for Hume, the imagination’s tendency is always from others to ourselves, ‘of whom we are every moment conscious’; by implication, the imagination is governed or dominated by sensory being. This dependence of the imagination on the senses is confirmed in Adam Smith’s account, where, in our sympathy with another, the imagination works by representing to us what would be our own [sensations], if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy … and thence form some idea of his sensations,
Circle of sympathy 117 and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.18 Here again, the imagination conceives of likeness and, in so doing, is both dependent on and weaker than the senses because, in that conception, it can only copy direct sensory response, of which it produces a weak imitation. What Hazlitt emphasizes on the other hand, is not so much the conception of likeness as the surpassing of difference. The imagination can conceive of others because it has a power to surmount difference that proves its independence of the senses; difference, moreover, subsists not only between ourselves and others, but also between our present selves and our future selves: ‘However nearly allied, however similar I may be to my future self … I am not to any moral or practical purpose the same being’ (i, 10–11). When we act with a view to our own interests, our actions are still other-directed, because that self which is the object of our action is located in the future, it is other to us because we are not experientially or immediately conscious of it. We can conceive of it only by means of the imagination; thus, since the object of volition is always a future object, that is, an object that is inaccessible to the senses, in all voluntary action, the imagination functions independently of sensory perception. The imagination, by means of which alone I can anticipate future objects, or be interested in them, must carry me out of myself into the feelings of others by one and the same process by which I am thrown forward as it were into my future being, and interested in it. I could not love myself, if I were not capable of loving others. (i, 1–2) Hazlitt others the self: where Hume translates all our other-directed feelings back to the self, returning easily from other to self, Hazlitt moves always from self to other, turning even our self-directed feelings outward, otherdirected. The variation in emphases from self to other is significant in that the second emphasis belongs to a larger vision of the imagination than the first. The focus on self foregrounds the imagination’s constraints, the focus on other, the imagination’s potential. By Hume’s account, because the principle of the operation of the imagination is contiguity or resemblance to the self, our sympathy with another, however strong, can never equal, let alone surpass our interest in ourselves: ‘when self is the object of a passion, ‘tis not natural to quit the consideration of it till the passion be exhausted’.19 Since it is impossible that the idea of another be as forceful as the idea of self, the difference in degree between the self-directed affections and those that are other-directed is necessary and abiding. But when the principle of the imagination’s working is its power to surmount other-ness, there is no necessary or essential difference in degree between our imagining of another and our
118 Uttara Natarajan interest in ourselves. The idea of another can operate with a force equal to or greater than the idea of self. For Hazlitt, as for Shelley, as I have said, the imagination acts without respect of person. To Hume, on the other hand, Whoever is united to us by any connexion is always sure of a share of our love, proportion’d to the connexion, without enquiring into his other qualities. Thus the relation of blood produces the strongest tie the mind is capable of feeling in the love of parents to their children, and a lesser degree of the same affection, as the relation lessens.20 Following Hume, Hazlitt recognizes the sensory constraint upon imaginative capacity. But his theory, unlike Hume’s, allows for such constraints to be altogether surpassed by the cultivation of the imagination. The attention, time and pains bestowed on these … give [a man] … a proportionable degree of anxiety about, and attachment to his own interest and that of those connected with him, but it would be absurd to conclude that his affections are therefore circumscribed by a natural necessity within certain limits which they cannot pass. (i, 43) Hume’s model is linear: imagination weakens and sympathy diminishes with increasing distance from the point of origin, the self. Hazlitt’s is circular: the self is the point of origin of a circle of sympathy which can be enlarged without loss or limit, whose compass is proportionate to the imagination’s strength, and all points of whose circumference are equidistant from the centre. Such a circle is recurrent throughout Hazlitt’s writings. In the Lectures on the English Poets, ‘The power of the imagination … has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit of the universe’ (‘On Dryden and Pope’, v, 70). In The Plain Speaker, ‘The boundary of our sympathy is a circle which enlarges itself according to its propulsion from the centre – the heart’ (‘On Reason and Imagination’; xii, 55), and in the essay on the ‘Outlines of Taste’: ‘this circle of our knowledge enlarges with further acquaintance and study’ (Miscellaneous Writings, xx, 388). It is just such a circle, a prototype of the key metaphor of the Defence where ‘Poetry … is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 135),21 that is constructed in Shelley’s ‘Speculations on Morals’: ‘The only distinction between the selfish man and the virtuous man is, that the imagination of the former is confined within a narrow limit, whilst that of the latter embraces a comprehensive circumference;’ thus, ‘disinterested benevolence is the product of a cultivated imagination’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 75–6; my italics). Hoagwood glosses such comments as an amalgam of Shelley’s reading of Hume and an older, classical notion of the ethical circle. But the circle properly belongs, not so much to Hume’s model of the imagination, as I have
Circle of sympathy 119 shown, as to Hazlitt’s. Because the circle is also key to the Defence, we might look more closely than hitherto at the bearing of Hazlitt’s philosophy, not only, as Dawson does, on the ‘Speculations’, but also on the canonical essay that the ‘Speculations’ anticipates. In the first place, the conceptual and verbal similarities between Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action and Shelley’s ‘Speculations on Morals’ linger in the Defence of Poetry. Shelley’s target in the Defence, as is Hazlitt’s in the Essay, is the thesis of self-interest as the basis of action, and the terms of his polemic – selfishness, mechanism, calculation – closely resemble Hazlitt’s. The references in the Defence to ‘mechanists’, ‘the calculating faculty’, ‘the principle of Self’, ‘the selfish and calculating principle’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 131–5),22 belong to a language that is employed throughout the Essay on the Principles of Human Action, of ‘mechanical selfinterest’; ‘gross calculation of self-interest’; ‘principle of general self-interest’; ‘principle of self-love’; ‘the selfish hypothesis’ (i: 1, 6, 16, 18, in both 22n and 40n). It should be acknowledged that that last phrase, ‘the selfish hypothesis’ is found also in Hume’s Enquiries Concerning the Principles of Morals (1777),23 and both in the Treatise and in the Enquiries, Hume sets about explicitly refuting the thesis that reduces benevolence to self-love.24 But the emphasis on the cultivation of imagination as a counter to ‘the principle of Self’, carried through into the Defence from its predecessors, the ‘Speculations on Morals’ and the Philosophical View of Reform, is nowhere explicit in Hume. On the other hand, it is as central to Hazlitt’s Essay as it is to Shelley’s case for poetry in the Defence. It is in this respect that the two arguments are most crucially parallel. In the Essay, a sentiment of general benevolence can only arise from an habitual cultivation of the natural disposition of the mind to sympathise with the feelings of others by constantly taking an interest in those which we know, and imagining others that we do not know, as the other feeling of abstract self-interest, that is in the degree in which it generally subsists, must be caused by a long narrowing of the mind to our own particular feelings and interests, and a voluntary insensibility to every thing which does not concern ourselves. It is this excessive attachment to our own good because it is ours … that I consider as a purely artificial feeling and as proper selfishness. (i, 14–15) Correspondingly, in the Defence, We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine … The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally
120 Uttara Natarajan circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and combining labour; to the exasperation of the inequality of mankind? … The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods … [of] an excess of the selfish and calculating principle. (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 134–5)25 In both passages, the habitual and excessive contraction of the self (Hazlitt’s ‘long narrowing of the mind’, Shelley’s circumscription ‘of the internal world’) can be countered by the cultivation of the imagination, this emphasis on cultivation gaining its force precisely from an idealist conception of an imagination which, while it is hampered by sensory responses, can, with cultivation, altogether surpass such responses, unlike in the empiricist model where the imagination, however effective, must remain always subordinate to sensory influence. It is the assurance that belongs more to the first model than the second, to Hazlitt more than to Hume, that is discernible in Shelley’s pronouncements that ‘Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination’; ‘Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb’; ‘The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 118, 121).26 (Shelley’s simile for the cultivation of the imagination, ‘in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb’, is also found in Hazlitt’s Essay: ‘the strength which is given to a muscle by habitual exertion’ [i, 17n].) The imagination, as Shelley describes it, can be enlarged in its capacity, yet remain undiminished in its force. Bacon’s writing, for instance, ‘distends, and then bursts the circumference of the hearer’s mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 115).27 The cultivated imagination negates the distinction between self and other, centre and circumference. In this respect, the parity posited in Shelley’s declaration that ‘Poetry … is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge’ can be recognized as the parity of self and other granted by the imagination in Hazlitt’s Essay: ‘Self-love … is in it’s fundamental principle the same with disinterested benevolence’ (i, 2). The parity of self and other achieved by the imagination enables it to become the object of its contemplation. In the Defence, It is impossible to feel them [the poet’s creations] without becoming a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explain how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with
Circle of sympathy 121 these sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous, and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self. (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 128)28 Earlier, in Prometheus Unbound, too, we have, ‘As a lover of chameleon / Grows like what it looks upon,’ and ‘Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates’.29 In his notes to Prometheus Unbound, Kelvin Everest suggests that in Shelley’s repeated references to this process, of the mind’s becoming that which it contemplates, he might have had in mind Hazlitt on Shakespeare.30 Hazlitt’s famous comments on Shakespeare (better known as being of considerable importance to Keats) occur in the Round Table essay ‘On Posthumous Fame’, first published in The Examiner of 22 May 1814: ‘He seemed scarcely to have an individual existence of his own, but to borrow that of others at will, and to pass successively through “every variety of untried being;”’ (iv, 23). Shelley might also have Shakespeare (and therefore Hazlitt) in mind when he writes in the Defence, ‘A man, to be greatly good … must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 118).31 The Defence, moreover, describes the cultivation of the imagination as a process of familiarization; poetry, as it ‘lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’ (Ingpen and Peck, vii, 117), renders the familiar, ideal, or synonymously, the ideal, familiar.32 Just such a purpose of familiarization is declared also in the ‘Preface’ to Prometheus Unbound: ‘My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination … of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence’.33 When the ideal is rendered familiar, then sensory being is subordinated to imaginative being, empirical to nonempirical process, so that poetry, for Shelley, achieves the practical moral end outlined for philosophy by Hazlitt in his letter to Gifford: The object of that Essay … is to leave free play to the social affections, and to the cultivation of the more disinterested and generous principles of our nature, by removing a stumbling-block which has been thrown in their way, and which turns the very idea of virtue or humanity into a fable, viz. the metaphysical doctrine of the innate and necessary selfishness of the human mind. (A Letter to William Gifford, ix, 51) Hazlitt’s philosophy shares with Shelley’s poetics, this ideal – also the object of both – of a mind or imagination that might be freed from the constraints of empirical process. It is worth noting that in at least one instance, Hazlitt also articulates a poetics in a form that bears a generic resemblance to Shelley’s. Shelley’s romantic idealism is famously expressed in the form of a poetic defence that belongs to a long and established line beginning with
122 Uttara Natarajan Aristotle’s Poetics. It has hardly been noticed that in its own time, the Defence of Poetry is most closely comparable to its most immediate forebear in that line: Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Poetry in General’, which opens the Lectures on the English Poets and which, like Shelley’s, is both recognizably of the genre of ‘defence’ and also characteristically romantic in its encompassing definition of poetry and its idealist model of the imagination. The parallels between Hazlitt’s moral philosophy and Shelley’s indicate, then, that Hazlitt might have had a greater influence on Shelley’s work than their strained personal relations might lead us to expect. Whether or not Shelley had a first-hand knowledge of Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action – and it is not integral to the case for influence that he did so – it is more than probable that he was familiar with its argument. Furthermore, if we admit the likelihood of Shelley’s having known Hazlitt’s Essay, we must acknowledge also that he would have found in it, not simply, as Hoagwood suggests, a ‘less comprehensive’ version of Hume, but a revision very much in keeping with his own larger conception of the imagination than Hume’s. It is this revision that can be shown to inform the ‘Speculations on Morals’ and, via the ‘Speculations’ to make its way into the moral philosophy of the Defence. To make this case is not to disclaim Hume’s importance to Shelley. It is simply to give Hazlitt his due place in the philosophical genealogy of a canonical Romantic text.
Part III
Parallels
9
‘Darkening Knowledge’ Hazlitt and Bentham on the limits of empiricism Tim Milnes
There are few more striking examples of the intellectual boundary that divided Romantic writer and utilitarian philosopher than the case of William Hazlitt’s sojourn as the tenant of Jeremy Bentham at 19 York Street, Westminster, between 1813 and 1819. During this time Hazlitt never once met his landlord, who lived next door and, for his part, Bentham seems to have been aware of the essayist only as a source of rent, for the nonpayment of which Hazlitt was duly evicted in the winter of 1819. However, in his portrait of Bentham five years later, Hazlitt does recall Bentham’s original plan to pull down number 19, which had once been the home of John Milton, to make ‘a thoroughfare, like a three-stalled stable, for the idle rabble of Westminster’ (xi, 6).1 In Hazlitt’s profile, later the leading essay in The Spirit of the Age (1825), Bentham’s indifference to the ‘cradle of Paradise Lost’ is depicted as symptomatic of an age dominated by abstraction, which, by seeking to ground all human life in factual truth, blinded itself to the non-rational powers of the mind that resisted such grounding:2 [Bentham has] reduced the theory and practice of human life to a caput mortuum of reason, and dull, plodding, technical calculation. … If the mind of man were competent to comprehend the whole of truth and good, and act upon it at once, and independently of all other considerations, Mr. Bentham’s plan would be a feasible one, and the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, would be the best possible ground to place morality upon. But it is not so. … We are not, then, so much to inquire what certain things are abstractedly or in themselves, as how they affect the mind. (xi, 8–9) The great irony of Bentham’s work, Hazlitt suggests, is that its obsession with acquiring clear-sighted and comprehensive knowledge of life is the very thing that restricts its vision. Abstracted ‘like an anchoret in his cell’ Bentham’s eye ‘glances not from object to object, but from thought to thought’ (xi, 6). Nowhere is this more evident than in his use of language, which, in insisting on neutrality, betrays its own rationalistic bias and, in striving for transparency, achieves only opacity:
126 Tim Milnes Mr. Bentham’s method of reasoning, though comprehensive and exact … is rather like an inventory, than a valuation of different arguments. … He writes a language of his own, that darkens knowledge. … The construction of his sentences is a curious frame-work with pegs and hooks to hang his thoughts upon, for his own use and guidance, but almost out of the reach of every body else. It is a barbarous philosophical jargon, with all the repetitions, parentheses, formalities, uncouth nomenclature and verbiage of law-Latin. … In short, Mr. Bentham writes as if he was allowed but a single sentence to express his whole view of a subject in. (xi, 14–15) What Hazlitt objects to most in Bentham is not specialized terminology as such, but a specific type of philosophical jargon that, with its semantic ‘pegs and hooks’, pretends to scientific objectivity but only ‘darkens knowledge’. Hazlitt could not have known Bentham’s ‘Essay on Logic’, posthumously published in 1843, but passages such as Section vii, ‘Of Exposition by Paraphrasis, with its Subsidiary Operations, viz. Phraseoplerosis and Archetypation’, display many of the qualities of which Hazlitt complains. Of ‘paraphrasis’, for example, Bentham furnishes the following definition: Paraphrasis is that mode of exposition which is the only instructive mode, where the thing expressed being the name of a fictitious entity, has not any superior in the scale of logical subalternation. Connected, and that necessarily, with paraphrasis, is an operation, for the designation of which the word Phraseoplerosis (i.e. the filling up of the phrase,) may be employed.3 Hazlitt’s charge is that this species of philosophical writing involves a kind of reification, which he calls abstraction, but which, following Gilbert Ryle and Clifford Geertz, we nowadays might term ‘thin’ description, or ‘beginning with a set of observations and attempting to subsume them under a governing law’.4 Hazlitt’s own prose, by contrast, is self-consciously thick with interpretation and rich with evaluation. It not only engages with Bentham in argument but becomes, with its punchy polemic and striking figures, itself a performance of that argument; of how both ‘things’ and, indeed, language ‘affect the mind’. The above passage, however, has further significance. Crucially, by defining ‘paraphrasis’ – itself a kind of exposition – Bentham is identifying and articulating the very use of language that Hazlitt finds deplorably prominent in his writing generally. Yet many commentators since have come to view paraphrasis as one of the great innovations in the philosophy of language. W.V. Quine even went so far as to identify Bentham’s paraphrastic method as the second of his five great ‘milestones’ of empiricism.5 More remarkable still is that the principal virtue of paraphrasis for Quine and his followers lies in the way that it enables analysis of highly abstract statements
‘Darkening knowledge’ 127 to be carried through without the presupposition of a theory-neutral semantic foundation for such an analysis. In other words, paraphrasis legitimates precisely the kind of ‘thick’ interpretative activity that Hazlitt claimed was lacking in Bentham’s writings. The question here, then, is: whose reading of Bentham is accurate, Hazlitt’s or Quine’s? This is not solely an exegetical matter. Pursuing it reveals a great deal not just about Bentham’s relation to the modern project to dismantle semantic and epistemological ‘foundations’, but also about Hazlitt’s own ambivalent relationship with what, in An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), he called the ‘dry romance’ of metaphysics (i, 37). Beyond this, a broader comparison of Hazlitt’s theory of abstraction to Bentham’s theory of fictions (of which paraphrasis forms the methodology) leads to some surprising conclusions about our constructions of Romanticism and Benthamite utilitarianism, which, ever since they were first articulated by John Stuart Mill over a century and a half ago, have remained remarkably resilient.6 Such conclusions challenge the depiction of much Romantic writing as a kind of figurative or poetic deconstruction of utilitarianism’s version of factual truth, or truth as ‘correspondence’.7 Indeed, close study reveals that it is Hazlitt rather than Bentham who remains attached, albeit unhappily, to such foundationalist paradigms of knowledge. Preliminary to such a study, however, must be a brief outline of how both writers responded to an inherited tradition of eighteenth-century empirical thought in Britain. On the face of it, Hazlitt’s position seems unambiguous. For him, the great philosophical blights of the age were empiricism in epistemology, materialism in ontology and egoism and utilitarianism in moral theory. That the last of these ills stemmed from the first two (which he saw as mutually sustaining) he spelled out clearly in his 1809 Prospectus of a History of English Philosophy. According to the ruling philosophy in Britain, he complained, ‘the mind itself is nothing, and external impressions everything. All thought is to be resolved into sensation, all morality into the love of pleasure, and all action into mechanical impulse’ (ii, 113–14). In opposition to this tradition, Hazlitt made it a cornerstone of his philosophy that ‘The mind has laws, powers, and principles of its own, and is not the mere puppet of matter’ (ii, 116). One of the most important of these ‘principles’ is outlined in his theory of abstraction. As laid out in his lecture ‘On Abstract Ideas’, this theory states that ‘all our notions from first to last, are strictly speaking, general and abstract, not absolute and particular’ (ii, 191). In some respects, the theory of abstraction represents an extension of the thesis of the 1805 Essay, which argues that without the creative activity of imagination, all practical reason (selfish as well as disinterested) would be impossible. Correspondingly, just as every deliberate action presupposes an act of imaginative projection into a future state, ‘Every idea of a sensible quality … implies the same power of generalization, of connecting several impressions into one sort, as the most refined and abstract idea of … space of time, or being itself’ (ii, 192). The link
128 Tim Milnes between the practical and theoretical reason, for Hazlitt, is a psychological one: as he puts it in his lecture ‘On Tooke’s “Diversions of Purley”’, in what was to become one of his favourite slogans: ‘The mind alone is formative’ (ii, 280). Working on this assumption, Hazlitt sought to dismiss one of the problems that had beset empiricism since Locke: namely, that of explaining how general, unifying concepts such as ‘mammal’ or ‘virtue’ are derived from particular ideas. Hazlitt agrees with John Horne Tooke that Locke’s account of ‘ABSTRACTION, whereby Ideas taken from particular Beings, become general Representatives of all of the same kind’ is unsatisfactory.8 First of all, Locke’s analysis frames abstract ideas as exotic, hybrid entities that are mysteriously particular and general at the same time. Secondly, it fails to account for the epistemic status of features of language such as grammatical particles, prepositions and conjunctions. Tooke himself had concluded that the problem of abstract ideas was a non-question built on the regrettable residue left by the corruption over centuries of an originally complex linguistic system into convenient abbreviations and abstractions, or what he called ‘subauditions’.9 Hazlitt’s reply is that the solution to the problem of the relation between the particular and the universal is not that the universal is a linguistic corruption of the particular, but that both are mindconstructed, and thus ‘more or less general’ (ii, 209). Hazlitt’s theory of abstraction combines two main strands of argument: idealism and realism. The idealistic component claims that knowledge is at least partly constructed by the mind. Exhaustive determination of concepts by sense-experience is impossible, he reasons, since reality is radically contingent and plural and so could never absolutely satisfy or verify an ostensibly unified idea or representation. This observation is deployed as early as 1807, in Hazlitt’s Preface to his abridgement of Abraham Tucker’s 1768–78 Light of Nature Pursued. ‘The moulds of the understanding’, Hazlitt argues, ‘may be said not to be large enough to contain the gross concrete objects of nature’; ‘Abstraction’, he maintains, ‘is a trick to supply the defect of comprehension’, leaving knowledge as at best the projection of concepts or ideas upon an empirically indeterminate world (i, 124). Yet remarks such as these also reveal that, like Kant but unlike Berkeley, Hazlitt remains a realist, insofar as he believes in the existence of a mindindependent reality. This realism is most clearly evident in his notion of ‘common sense’. The thesis that all knowledge is abstract, he maintains, does not entail that all experience is abstract. ‘Common’ sense is thus a sense, obtained through the association of ideas (viii, 35),10 of the boundary where our abstract or ideal cognition ends and the infinitely plural world of concrete, real particulars begins.11 Given his criticism of Bentham, it is ironic that Hazlitt, in his essay ‘Common Sense’ and elsewhere, figures this field of experience as a dark zone of instinct at the margins of the knowable, through which common sense ‘does not feel its way the less surely because it proceeds often mechanically and blindly’ (xx, 290). Similarly, in the Preface to Tucker, he muses that a man ‘who disdains the use of common sense … is
‘Darkening knowledge’ 129 like a person who should deprive himself of the use of his eye-sight, in order that he might be able to grope his way better in the dark!’ (i, 124–5). Indeed, Hazlitt’s use of chiaroscuro is revealing precisely because it indicates his continuing attachment to a basic model of knowledge as consisting in the correspondence between things, namely, mind and reality. It is the inevitable failure of this correspondence that necessitates the operation of the ‘blind’ intuitive power of common sense, through which we are nonetheless able to think and act, as Hazlitt puts it, ‘in the dark’. Hazlitt’s epistemology, then, can appear deceptively radical. On one hand, according to the theory of abstraction, knowledge is already epistemic at its base. Even the most obvious or immediate fact, such as the whiteness of snow, is epistemic; that is, based on the mind’s abstractions. In this light, Hazlitt’s philosophy, like the transcendentalism of Kant, can be viewed as part of a wider move in Western thought towards seeing the materials of knowledge as ‘constructed’ rather than ‘given’. However, Kant’s theory of knowledge rests upon transcendental as well as psychological conditions. Parallel to the architectonic of faculties and sensory manifolds in the Critique of Pure Reason runs a system of logic built from statements or ‘propositions’; specifically, a priori propositions so established because of their ‘indispensability for the possibility of experience’.12 For Hazlitt, however, things – specifically, ideas – and not primarily propositions or statements of reasons, are what keep knowledge afloat. In this critical respect at least, Hazlitt seems nearer to Locke, and Kant, a philosopher Hazlitt generally held in high regard, appears unexpectedly closer to the utilitarian thinker he attempted to undermine in The Spirit of the Age. Bentham turned to address problems of knowledge and language relatively late in his career, and a little reluctantly. However, his impatience with metaphysical questions was not the product of mere philistinism, the intolerance of the legal reformer for theory, but emerged rather from the conviction that any attempt to separate the ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ of human life was a mistake. For Bentham, the epistemologist’s mission to abolish error from the grounds of knowledge was subordinate to eudæmonics, the study of the good life and ‘well-being’. As he puts it in an appendix to his 1815 pedagogical work, Chrestomathia: ‘Eudæmonics … may be said to be the object of every branch of art, and the subject of every branch of science’.13 However, if Bentham sounds confident here, it is due to the fact that he had by this time reviewed the philosophical problems that had ambushed him while preparing his first major work on jurisprudence, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, three decades earlier. He recounts his surprise at the sudden intrusion of these difficulties in the Introduction’s Preface: The body of the work had received its completion according to the then present extent of the author’s views, when … he found himself unexpectedly entangled in an unsuspected corner of the metaphysical maze.
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Tim Milnes A suspension, at first not apprehended to be more than a temporary one, necessarily ensued.14
In fact, it was not until the early 1810s that Bentham finally turned to address directly the issues in which he had become entangled. He did so in a series of essays, including most notably ‘A Fragment on Ontology’, the ‘Essay on Logic’, the ‘Essay on Language’ and the ‘Fragments on Universal Grammar’.15 But what was the ‘metaphysical maze’ that caused Bentham so much bother? It emerges, among other places, in the Introduction’s important chapter, ‘Of Motives’. Here, Bentham’s analysis of the term ‘motive’ is soon complicated by his realization that the word has two distinct meanings; one literal and legitimate, the other figurative and fictitious. The first denotes ‘any of those really existing incidents from whence the act in question is supposed to take its rise’; the second, ‘a certain fictitious entity, a passion, an affectation of the mind, an ideal being’.16 Logical fictions such as ‘motive’ differ importantly from poetical fictions like centaurs in that they are indispensable to thought.17 Nonetheless, Bentham saw that legal fictions were linked to a web of figuration that stretched much deeper into human thought and language than he had anticipated. The language of reform and the reform of language could not be separated: Confining himself to the language most in use, a man can scarce avoid running, in appearance, into perpetual contradictions. … To obviate this inconvenience, completely, he has but this one unpleasant remedy; to lay aside the old phraseology and invent a new one.18 Utilitarianism, it seemed, could not after all simply make do without a thoroughly worked-out ontology, an epistemology, and a theory of logic or language. The first two together must distinguish between real entities like physical bodies and ‘individual perceptions’ on one hand and fictitious entities such as ‘faculties, powers of the mind, dispositions’ on the other.19 The task of the third was to ‘give direction and assistance’ to human thought by translating the language of fictions as much as possible into that of real entities: and in Bentham’s ontology, nothing was more real than sensations of pleasure and pain. Thus, Bentham’s assertion of the priority of eudæmonics was now supported by the epistemological argument, as made in A Table of the Springs of Action (1817), that ‘pleasures and pains [are] the basis of all other entities’. Crucially, it is his utilitarianism that leads Bentham to deny that any psychological entity is epistemically privileged: all human awareness, regardless of immediacy, is mediated via the ‘receptacles’ of pleasure and pain.20 The denial of the value-neutral status of sensation is what underlies Bentham’s rejection of Hume’s distinction between fact and value, and his correspondingly pragmatic insistence in the ‘Essay on Logic’ that ‘in no place is anything to be known, but in the same place there is something to be
‘Darkening knowledge’ 131 done’.21 It forms the critical context for his attempt to invent a new ‘phraseology’ – based on the sound ontology of a hedonic register that would translate abstract statements into the lexicon of pleasure and pain – that would remain untroubled by the problem of whether the ‘mind’ corresponded to the ‘world’. However, at this point another problem presented itself: that of the method of analysis by which such a translation could take place. In a footnote to an earlier work, A Fragment on Government (1776), Bentham had discounted the traditional method of definition per genus et differentiam favoured by D’Alembert and the encyclopédistes. Fictional entities or abstractions, he observes, cannot have examples or instances, and so cannot be defined in terms of a superior genus. Thus Bentham asks, rhetorically, ’what is a disposition?’ and imagines the reply: ‘“A disposition is a …:” and there we stop. The fact is, a disposition has no superior genus: a disposition is not a … any thing’.22 Conventional analysis will not work on fictions because the meaning of fictions is always over-determined. Or as Bentham puts it in the ‘Essay on Logic’, unlike physical syntheses or aggregates like a bushel of apples, logical aggregates are radically indeterminate, in that they are open to ‘the unlimited powers, of decomposition and recomposition possessed by the human mind’; the conventional view of analysis and synthesis as ‘counterpart’ activities is a myth: one cannot simply ‘unpack’ an abstract idea as one would unpack a barrel of apples.23 Similarly, the Lockean method of explicating individual terms by tracing them back to simple ideas or primitive perceptions rested upon the presumption of a field of neutral experiential data (ideas or impressions) to which Bentham, as has been seen, did not subscribe. Even Tookeian grammar, notwithstanding its deconstruction of so-called complex ideas, saw sensation or the simple idea as the foundation of linguistic reference.24 Bentham, however, with his utilitarian and pragmatic view of the alreadyevaluative status of sensation, held no brief for the stable referent as a ‘given’ psychological entity. Because of this, he was prepared to take his theory of fictions beyond Tooke, suggesting that language itself creates ideas, giving them a kind of ‘verbal reality, so to speak … without which the matter of language could never have been formed’.25 By accepting that figuration went all the way down to the referent, Bentham drew the sting from Tooke’s relativistic deconstruction of ‘truth’ into ‘that which is TROWED’.26 Since meaning was not psychological and causal, but holistic and relational, Bentham could allow that it was perfectly possible for a word to be used correctly and successfully by a number of people who associate with it quite different ideas, or even no ideas at all. The meaning of a term was determined not by causation, but by context. For Bentham, two important consequences immediately follow from this position. The first is that the basic units of meaning are not single terms, but whole statements, speech acts or propositions. Tooke had seen abbreviations and abstractions as degenerate language, but had failed to apply this
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observation to terms themselves. However, as Bentham argues in the ‘Essay on Language’: Every man who speaks, speaks in propositions, the rudest savage, not less than the most polished orator, – terms taken by themselves are the work of abstraction, the produce of a refined analysis: – ages after ages must have elapsed before any such analysis was ever made.27 Secondly, in order to create his ‘new phraseology’, Bentham now developed a method of contextual definition, which he called paraphrasis. He gave many different accounts of this method, but one of the clearest is found in his ‘Essay on Logic’, in a passage that immediately follows the one cited at the beginning of this essay: By the word paraphrasis may be designated that sort of exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition, having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity.28 It is vital to realize here that as far as Bentham is concerned, paraphrasis, the non-foundational search for meaning, exhausts the metaphysical field of enquiry. At the same time, the new method obviates the ontological embarrassment encountered by empiricists such as Locke, Hume and Tooke: the very point of paraphrasis is that what counts as a ‘real entity’ is ultimately a matter of coherence within a linguistic community, not one of correspondence between word and object. As Quine noted of Bentham; ‘He recognized that to explain a term we do not need to specify an object for it to refer to’; paraphrasis thus enables one ‘to explain talk of bodies in terms of talk of impressions by translating one’s whole sentences about bodies into whole sentences about impressions, without equating the bodies themselves to anything at all’.29 More generally, then, Bentham’s theory of fictions signals a critical shift in Western thought towards prioritizing the ‘conceptual’ over the ‘doctrinal’ in philosophy and recasting the ‘problem’ of truth as a sub-category of the question of meaning. So, how does this affect our reading of Hazlitt’s reading of Bentham in The Spirit of the Age? To begin with, it appears that the two erstwhile neighbours remain, in some respects, surprisingly close. They both confront empirical scepticism, ultimately the by-product of Hume’s distinction between ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’, by accepting that our knowledge of the world is indeterminate. Moreover, both see this as a corollary of the mediated nature of perception; the over-determination of particular impressions by thought.30 But while for Bentham this mediation is inherently linguistic, for Hazlitt it is the projection of psychological power. In Hazlitt’s scheme, abstraction is the foundation of knowledge; in Bentham’s, abstraction is itself figured thought. Interestingly, then, both writers appear to
‘Darkening knowledge’ 133 evade John Barrell’s characterization of Romantic period writing as fundamentally referential yet troubled by a higher order of abstraction whose validity is ‘ambiguously questioned and confirmed’, in that both seek to undermine the notion of referentiality from the outset.31 Nonetheless, they deploy crucially different strategies. Bentham’s theory of fictions is intimately bound up with his utilitarianism. His refusal of the science/art and theory/practice binaries permits him to adopt a thoroughly pragmatic approach to questions of knowledge and meaning, which, far from merely eliding traditional epistemological problems, as some commentators have alleged, seeks to overcome them by placing them within a semantic context.32 Hazlitt, meanwhile, sees the failure of foundationalism as something that has rich implications for poetry, art, and the ineffable realm of ‘common sense’. As he claims in the 1826 Plain Speaker essay, ‘On People of Sense’, the inability of philosophers to ‘ground’ knowledge securely in empirical fact did not imply the impossibility of distinguishing theory from practice. Contrary to ‘people of sense’ such as Bentham and Shelley, it merely implied the limitations of theory. Both writers, Hazlitt argues, are guilty of placing the theoretical before the experiential, that is, the intuitive awareness of manifold particularity. The danger in this, he notes, is that ‘He who pretends to fit words to things, will much oftener accommodate things to words, to answer a theory’. However, Bentham’s paraphrastic agenda, his attempt ‘to fit words to things’, was based upon the radical ontology of his theory of fictions, which undermined the very separation of language and thought presupposed by Hazlitt’s charge. Hazlitt himself, meanwhile, does not subordinate ‘thing’ to ‘word’, but renders language as the intuitive medium of psychological power: Words are a measure of truth. They ascertain (intuitively) the degrees, inflections, and powers of things in a wonderful manner. … Language is the medium of our communication with the thoughts of others. But whoever becomes wise, becomes wise by sympathy; whoever is powerful, becomes so by making others sympathize with him. (xii, 250) Accordingly, the relegation of the cognitive in human life is answered by the elevation of the intuitive, the affective and the phenomenological; in other words, the very domains of painting, poetry and music traditionally scouted by people of sense as ‘involving no useful theory or principle … no opportunity for darkening knowledge, and setting up their own blindness and frailty as the measure of abstract truth’ (xii, 245). As in his essay on Bentham, Hazlitt exploits the irony of knowledge occluded by the very attempt to reduce experience to transparent facts. As Tom Paulin notes, Hazlitt’s resistance to what he saw as Benthamite literalness produced self-consciously performative ‘poetic’ prose at once rich in metaphor and grounded in ‘common sense exactness’.33 By contrast, as Hazlitt declares, the ‘moon-eyed philosophers’
134 Tim Milnes of the Chrestomathic school ‘are all abroad, in a wide sea of speculation without rudder or compass, the instant they leave the shore of matter-of-fact or dry reasoning’ (xii, 248, 251). This turning of the tables on ‘people of sense’ is ingenious footwork on Hazlitt’s part, but its irony, as ever, is finely balanced. For it is clear that far from seeing the ‘matter-of-fact’ as a dry shore on which to construct his speculations, the later Bentham at least treated it, like all logical fictions, as a guide to building his boat while already at sea. For Bentham, philosophical and political writing is ‘thick’ for the same reason that anthropological writing is ‘thick’ for Geertz: both are ‘fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are “something made”, “something fashioned”’.34 Indeed, as Angela Esterhammer observes, Bentham’s acknowledgement of the priority of the figurative over the psychological means that he fully embraced the performativity of language, with all its contingencies and breakdowns, precisely because he saw it as inescapable.35 Hazlitt’s idea of metaphor as a medium for the power of mind, by contrast, leaves him looking much more like the metaphysician that many commentators now recognize him to be. The epistemological legitimacy of this power could not but trouble Hazlitt, however. He was not an idealist in the contemporary German mould, in that he did not accept that knowledge could be founded on a priori propositions. Uttara Natarajan locates the ambivalence of Hazlitt’s position when she attributes to him ‘an understanding of power as epistemological’.36 This, she claims, is partly effected through his denial of the real/ideal binary and articulation of the ‘symbiosis of particular and abstract’.37 While such a refusal of the particular/abstract division is certainly part of Hazlitt’s strategy, it should be noted that it presents significant risks to someone wishing to preserve the ideal nature of knowing and, perhaps, the autonomy of metaphysics. Rather than a fusion, there is a detectable tension in Hazlitt’s writing between power and epistemology. His challenge is to find a conception of power that would explain the symbiosis of particular and abstract without undermining philosophy as such. Collapsing the distinction altogether would have produced what Wilfred Sellars once identified as a kind of ‘psychological nominalism, according to which … all awareness of abstract entities – indeed, all awareness even of particulars – is a linguistic affair’.38 This is close to Tooke’s position. Hazlitt, however, consistently argues for the priority of the ideal or psychological over the linguistic. In his New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue (1809) and in the 1812 Lectures on English Philosophy, while he agrees with Tooke that Locke’s attempt to explain meaning by relating words to particular ideas is a failure, Hazlitt’s claim is that this merely indicates how reference is rooted in general or abstract ideas. As he argues in his lecture on the Diversions of Purley, Tooke’s etymological reductivism is ill-conceived, since ‘the existence and use of general terms is alone a sufficient proof of the power of abstraction in the human mind; nor is it possible to give even a plausible account of language without it’ (ii, 280).
‘Darkening knowledge’ 135 By insisting that language itself is an (abstract) psychological affair, Hazlitt actually maintains the distinction between abstract and particular. For as long as language is rendered as the medium whereby an abstracting mind orders the world, the particularity of that world remains the ‘given’ in experience. As Hazlitt argues in his Grammar, the fact that the forms of language vary according to human perspectives upon the world means that the constitution of that world remains theory-neutral: ‘The things themselves do not change, but it is we who view them in a different connection with other things’.39 As a consequence, the relationship between mind and world remains an epistemological problem. In this way, Hazlitt implicitly defends the vocation of philosophy as received from Descartes, namely the grounding of knowledge. For to remove the distinction between abstract and particular, and eliminate talk of concepts and their contents, would be to transform epistemology itself from a discipline concerned with the foundations of knowledge into a study of meaning. I have argued that Bentham’s reduction of metaphysics to paraphrasis, itself an extension of Tooke’s methodology, represents just such a transformation. By contrast, Hazlitt’s ontology of power begins to look like the ad hoc means whereby a reified perceptive or phenomenological field is defended against the kind of linguistic reduction carried out by Tooke and Bentham. Within this field, the distinction between particular and abstract is clouded without being erased, so that the epistemological status of the quasi-cognitive power of ‘blind’ intuition or common sense, working beyond the reach of abstraction, remains nebulous. The irony within Hazlitt’s irony in ‘Bentham’ and ‘On People of Sense’, then, is that his critique of Bentham’s supposedly thin, non-performative prose takes the form of a performance that, rather than dispensing with the notion of a ‘correspondence’ between mind and world, reinscribes this correspondence in the crepuscular grounds of common sense. By contrast, Bentham’s utilitarian, pragmatic method of paraphrasis, acknowledges, in its very ‘uncouth nomenclature’, its own groundlessness and defeasibility. He thereby evades the ‘metaphysical’ discourse, to which, with all its phenomenological light and shade, Hazlitt remains committed. Surprisingly, then, it is Hazlitt who emerges from this debate as the covert defender of empiricism, a discourse he mistakenly ascribes to Bentham. Hazlitt’s idealism renders problematic, but does not eliminate, the empiricist’s division of word and object. Bentham, cast as the empirical philosopher par excellence, now seems to be nothing of the kind: while Hazlitt remains rebelliously confined within the empirical paradigm, Bentham, as Quine observes, has moved the agenda on. What are the broader ramifications of this perspective? To begin with, Mill’s assessment of Bentham’s relation to Romanticism (albeit in the figure of Coleridge) now appears fundamentally flawed. Having constructed his mythology of early nineteenth-century thought between Bentham and Coleridge as its alpha and omega, Mill famously determined that ‘By
136 Tim Milnes Bentham … men have been led to ask … Is it true? and by Coleridge, What is the meaning of it?’40 Mill shares Hazlitt’s misconception of Bentham as an empiricist in the conventional mould with a particular yen for utility. Yet what Quine, among others, has demonstrated is that Bentham always saw the question, ‘is it true?’ as subordinate to the question, ‘what does it mean?’ – i.e. ‘how does it translate in paraphrase?’ Conversely, for Coleridge and Hazlitt, despite their manifold differences, issues of meaning always reduced to principles of truth, whether this was in Coleridge’s primordial ‘logos’ or Hazlitt’s dark foundation of plural sensation. The key mistake here is in reading Bentham as the philosopher of ‘fact’. This misapprehension, once in place, makes Hazlitt’s dismissal of Bentham’s self-defeating ‘jargon’ as inevitable as Mill’s own assessment of the philosopher’s impenetrable later prose ‘as the reductio ad absurdum of his objection to poetry’.41 It also has significant implications for our own constructions of ‘utilitarianism’ and ‘Romanticism’. For instance, Hazlitt and Mill’s Romantic and ironic unpicking of Bentham’s prose survives in David Collings’s claim that Bentham’s suppression of metaphor betrays the fact ‘that identity must always be a form of figuration’.42 But the well-worn argument that Bentham’s writing deconstructs itself in its own heroic attempt for the ultra-literal loses some of its grip, to say the least, when one realizes that, for Bentham, referentiality was simply a less performative mode of figuration. As he writes in the ‘Essay on Language’: ‘The discourse that … is not figurative is the discourse in which … no other fictions, – no other figures are employed than are absolutely necessary’.43 Once Hazlitt’s metaphysics and Bentham’s linguistics are understood, the easy opposition of Romantic figuration to utilitarian abstraction appears unconvincing. Accordingly, I would suggest that we might construct an alternative narrative to Mill’s. This would coordinate itself between Bentham’s insistence that all discourse is more or less figurative, and Hazlitt’s belief that all knowledge is ‘more or less general’. It would register that while both test the limits of empiricism, the epistemological commitments of the first are paraphrastic and disambiguating, those of the second, idealistic and selfconsciously ‘darkening’.
10 Schelling and Hazlitt on Disinterestedness and Freedom Frederick Burwick
In 1809, when Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling wrote his essay on Human Freedom (Philosophische Untersuchung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit), the German provinces were under French occupation. Schelling himself had gained his appointment at the new University of Munich after the French had taken over the former Bavarian university in Ingolstadt. Schelling wrote in a context of immediate threat to the principles of freedom. Although he endeavoured to develop his argument upon Kantian principles of ‘general’ and ‘necessary’ action, he was not content to reiterate the ‘categorical imperative’ on purely rational grounds. Like William Hazlitt, he sought to humanize the argument for social, political, and individual ethics by addressing the primal triggers for action. Although Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805) bears obvious similarities with the aesthetics of disinterestedness and the concept of freedom in Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), there is also much in his argument that also anticipates Schelling’s frustration with ‘wandering the honourable way of Kant’.1 In examining the concept of aesthetic disinterest as elucidated in Kant, Hazlitt, and Schelling, I will demonstrate how ostensible ‘disinterest’ actually contributes to a broader range of arguments on human freedom, in relation both to the older free will and determinism debate as well as to the more current ideological concerns with benevolence and progress. In refuting the mechanistic implications of associationist doctrine, Hazlitt and Schelling address the workings of the brain, perceptual response, and cognitive process. From the time the word ‘disinterest’ was first imported into moral discourse in the seventeenth century, it carried with it an ambiguity in its range of connotations. The absence of interest could mean ‘impartiality’, but it might also mean ‘lack of concern’. In moral argument, the emphasis was on motives free of personal, self-serving bias. The antonym of ‘disinterest’, therefore, was not ‘interest’ per se, but ‘self-interest’. The motive for a moral act cannot be anticipation of reward – neither the momentary reward of selfcongratulating pleasure, nor the long-term reward of admission into Heaven. Rather, the truly moral act must be impartial, unbiased, unprejudiced, and free from personal interest. As expressed in 1643 by the chemist and natural
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philosopher Robert Boyle, to act morally is to imitate divine benevolence and reflect the ‘Disinterestedness of his Love to us’.2 In the textbook on oratory that Obadiah Walker prepared in 1659, the year before he was allowed to resume teaching at Oxford, the imitation of divine disinterestedness is advocated as the ground for Solomon-like judgement: ‘The soul … sits now as the most disinterested Arbiter, and impartial judge of her own works, that she can be’.3 Repeatedly in these early formulations, ‘disinterestedness’ is an ideal opposed to a prevailing selfishness. Thus in his commentary on the New Testament, George Stanhope cannot gloss the commandment of Mark 12:31 without reference to the contrasting mode of social behaviour: ‘So should the Love to our Neighbour be … Not mercenary and designing, but disinterested and hearty’.4 Had there been a greater confidence in the possibility of ‘disinterestedness’ as moral ground, perhaps there would have been a less extreme reaction to Helvétius’s dismissal of the concept as utter absurdity. Helvétius, in De l’esprit (1758), declared the impossibility of any selflessly altruistic or philanthropic act. All behaviour, he argued, is motivated by self-interest. The pretence of ‘disinterestedness’ is never more than self-delusion disguising a self-serving attempt to garner the praise of others. The faculty of the Sorbonne was outraged at this apparent endorsement of unbridled self-gratification. Helvétius’s immoral book was publicly burned at Paris. But the world loves a scandal. De l’esprit was immediately translated into English as Essays on the Mind in 1759, and into most other European languages, becoming more widely read than any other book of the time. Endorsed by the French Encyclopedists, the sceptical and materialistic views of Helvétius and his philosophy of hedonistic egocentrism gained popularity during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Taking Locke’s empirical ground of knowledge in sensation to an extreme, Helvétius argued that sensation and sensual response are the sole source of human learning and action. Human conduct is driven by self-love, the desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain. When he turned to education in De l’homme, de ses facultés intellectuelles et de son éducation (published posthumously in 1772), Helvétius acknowledged the social foundation of institutions designed to protect selfinterests. Churches, schools, and courts, in his view, were developed for the common benefit to insulate individuals from the more severe consequences in pursuing self-gratification. Even prisons and insane asylums are socially constituted extensions of self-serving interests. Hazlitt’s brilliant response to Helvétius was to deconstruct the very concept of the ‘self’. Hazlitt argued that the concept of the self is a mental construct, an epiphenomenon of consciousness in the moment. It has no abiding identity. Because consciousness is continually generating an idea of self, the mind falls under its ‘spell’, numbing its power to discriminate changing attributes, and ‘spreading the confused associations which belong only to the past and present impressions over the whole of our imaginary existence’ (Howe, i, 3). The ‘self’, which is the supposed recipient of future
Schelling and Hazlitt on disinterestedness and freedom 139 pleasure or pain, is an imaginary entity and as such has a status equivalent to the ‘other’ as recipient of pleasure and pain. Hazlitt therefore dismisses the integrity of a future ‘self’ and the argument ‘that I shall have a real sensible interest in my own future feelings which I cannot possibly have in those of others’ (Howe, i, 4). Hazlitt thus avoids the solipsistic trap of self-centred egotism placed in the path of all philosophies which, as Coleridge describes them, affirm the subjective and then must explain ‘how there supervenes to it a coincident objective’.5 The assumption of the ‘identity of my individual being, so that whatever can be affirmed of that principle at any time must be strictly and logically true of it at all times’, Hazlitt declares, ‘is a wild and absurd notion’ (Howe, i, 4). When the mind constructs its scenarios for future action all its dramatis personae are imaginary, the ‘self’ as well as any of the characters with whom it is supposed to interact. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), proudly declared the ‘Copernican revolution’ he had accomplished in philosophy by identifying a mind-centred universe, but he too recognized the solipsistic trap and resolved it, much as Hazlitt was to do, by declaring that mind had no more immediate access to its own essential identity than it had to any other entity in the world external to it. Perception leads to apperception: a state in which the mind reflects on itself as the arena of awareness in which the data of the senses is gathered and organized. The mind reflects upon itself: conscious not only of perceptions but also of the act of perceiving. This reflection of mind upon itself as a conscious agent is the ground for defining a ‘self’. Kant calls this awareness that accompanies perception ‘The: I think’ – ‘Das: Ich denke’ (K3: 136–7; § 16). It has none of the persisting identity which René Descartes assumed in claiming the ‘I think’ as ground for being – ‘cogito ergo sum’. As a surface that mirrors what is projected upon it by the senses and also reveals what rises up from memories stored in its depths, it also has the capacity to arrange these thoughts and images. Yet it can never delve below the reflecting surface of consciousness. Therefore it has no more access to its own noumenal identity than it has to the identity of any other object of perception. Kant distinguished between phenomenon (the thing as it appears to the senses) and noumenon (the thing in itself, as it actually is). While perception of things leads to awareness of a perceiving self, that self, too, is only a phenomenon. For Schelling, however, the unity of the ‘finite I’ is possible only through the unity of an ‘absolute I’. (Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, Ch. xiii, adapted his definition of the imagination from Schelling’s argument of the conscious participation of the ‘finite I’ in the ‘absolute I’.)6 Schelling insisted that the subject (the finite I) can sustain a sense of its own identity only to the degree that it can affirm an absolute identity beyond its own momentary manifestation. As the only ground for positing the finite ‘I am’, the ‘absolute I’ is the conditional but necessary principle for positing a unity of thought, a unity of consciousness. If an ‘I am’ accompanies the ‘I think’ of consciousness, its possibility depends on an originary presence of an ‘absolute I’.7
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In his System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800), Schelling argued that art accomplishes the synthesis of mind and nature that philosophers can only talk about. The artist, that is, infuses and transforms the material medium (be it marble or clay, pigment and canvas, or words) with the mental energy of the creative process. This synthesis in art thus reveals the identity of ‘conscious’ productivity (mind) and ‘unconscious’ productivity (nature). Beginning in 1801, Schelling began to formulate his ‘Identitäts-philosophie’ as further confirmation of the ‘absolute I’. Material nature and the mind that knows it are different aspects of the same ‘absolute identity’ in which both are grounded. In his Zeitschrift für speculative Physik (1800–2), Schelling drew upon recent developments in electricity, magnetism, and galvanism to argue that these pervasive energies informed and constituted all material being both inorganic and organic, inanimate and animate, insentient and sentient. Manifest in all life and matter, they made all being possible. Mind no less than matter is a constellation of dynamic energies. The essential difference lies in the sentience of mind, a capacity in that construct of energy enabling it to reflect upon itself. David Hartley, in his Observations on Man (1749), explained the associative processes of memory in terms of the physiology of the brain and the sensory through the nervous system. Sensory impressions of external objects are transmitted as vibrations through the nerves to the brain, where a pattern of those vibrations is recorded in the medullary particles. When the senses respond to a similar set of vibrations, a conscious connection is evoked reawakening earlier impressions according to their kind and location in the brain. Because he based his account of associative memory on the workings of the brain and nervous system, he invited commentators to turn to subsequent developments in brain research. The mind/brain problem remained thoroughly embedded in the accounts of associationism. Schelling rejected Hartley’s doctrine of associationism as mechanistically rigid, and he found the phrenological brain mapping of Franz Josef Gall reductive and arbitrary. In his Jahrbücher der Medicin als Wissenschaft (1805–6), Schelling turned instead to John Brown’s analysis of excitation in Elementa Medicinae (1792) as more relevant to his own ideas on sensory response.8 Hazlitt, too, found it necessary to redefine Hartley’s explanation of memory and imagination. Although he fully endorses the processes of association, Hazlitt objects ‘that it is an absurdity … to suppose that association is either the only mode of operation of the human mind, or that it is the primary and most general principle of thought and action’ (Howe, i, 51). Having directed impressions to their various locations within a compartmentalized brain, Hartley could not account for their retrieval ‘by any other means than the accidental justling of these one against the other’ (Howe, i, 52). According to Hartley’s model, the brain functions only through a system of impulses relayed by ‘mechanical communication’ from one part of the brain to another. Hazlitt counters Hartley with his reaffirmation of the sensorium commune.9
Schelling and Hazlitt on disinterestedness and freedom 141 Consciousness, Hazlitt insisted, is a whole brain activity. Even when triggered by some oblique sensation – a smell, a sound, an image – memories are whole brain phenomena. If a person should in some strange place suddenly see an excellent picture of their dead father or mother, I suppose there can be no doubt but the picture would call up the memory of the person whom it resembled with an instantaneous and irresistible force. (Howe, i, 52) Such a complete reanimation of a remembered person would not come rushing back into consciousness if the data were stored in discreet compartments for each of the various details of colour, texture, size, shape, sound, smell. The very spatial and temporal coordination of the senses that is manifest in immediate perceptual awareness is replicated, or at least approximated, in the act of recollection. Memory is possible because the brain spontaneously reassembles such factors as location and relationship of parts, their motion, their succession: ‘Unless this were the case, we could never recollect any thing at all, as every object is necessarily composed of parts, and those again of others without end’ (Howe, i, 52). Hazlitt sought to reconcile the opposition of parts versus whole. The experience of holistic consciousness somehow had to overcome the radical divisions of external nature (its flux and manifold attributes), of sensation (the separate operation of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell), of the brain (its division into two hemispheres, a cerebrum and cerebellum, each part apparently having separate functions). Hazlitt admits the difficulty of combating associationist theory without using the vocabulary of the very notions which he opposes. Thus he must go on talking of the seats of our ideas, the different parts of the brain, the communication of thought by impulse, &c. till it is clearly shewn that the hypothesis to which all these expressions refer is in reality good for nothing. (Howe, i, 53) Hazlitt is not denying that the brain may be divided into parts. His point is, rather, that consciousness is the interaction of the organic whole: ‘every idea, or perception is communicated to all the parts of the brain, or to the whole sentient principle, whatever this is supposed to be’; in a note, he explains that he equates the word ‘consciousness’ with ‘conscientia, the knowing or perceiving many things by a simple act’ (Howe, i, 53 and 53n). The association of ideas is thus more spontaneous and immediate than described in Hartley’s account of vibrational relays. In Hazlitt’s account, the ideas are not stored in consciousness, but rather consciousness is made up of constituent ideas:
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Frederick Burwick before these ideas can be perceived in connection as making parts of a whole, or can be accompanied with a consciousness of each other’s existence, we must suppose them mutually to affect the seats of action belonging to each other, or else to be united in some common principle of thought, the same comparing power being exerted upon both. (Howe, i, 53)
Once ideas and images are brought together in consciousness they become a part of the organic structure of the brain. Thus the impressions are embedded in the act of perception, and memory is the re-evocation of that act – and with it all the original impressions – and with it, too, the sentient self in whom the perception and remembrance have their organic residence. Indeed, our sense of self is simply the awareness of the being in which these impressions reside. The ‘idea of individuality’, Hazlitt declared, ‘could never have been so much as conceived of if there were no other connection between our ideas than that which arises from the juxtaposition of the particles of matter on which they are severally impressed’ (Howe, i, 54). The sense of self is conditioned by the present and the past. No corresponding sense of self informs the imaginative scenarios for future action, because those scenarios are not a reassembling of the present or remembered impressions. The consciousness from which emerges a self-consciousness or consciousness of the self can no more derive from ‘proximity of different impressions’ than people in a line can be supposed, by their proximity, to read ‘each other’s minds’ (Howe, i, 54). Not juxtaposition, not even superimposition of impressions within ‘the fantastical mosaic-work of the brain’ can be supposed to solicit such an intense chatter from cell to cell as would produce – not chaotic noise – but successive reasoning in an alert and lucid consciousness (Howe, i, 54). For if we suppose the succession of our ideas to be carried on by the communication of the impulse belonging to one idea to the contiguous cell, or dormitory of another idea formerly associated with it, and if we at the same time suppose each idea to occupy a separate cell which is inviolable, and which it has entirely to itself, then undoubtedly the ideas thus called up will follow one another in the same order in which they were originally excited. But if we take away this imaginary allotment of separate parcels of the brain to different ideas and suppose the same substance or principle to be constantly impressed with a succession of different ideas, then there seems to be no assignable reason why a vibratory motion accompanied with thought in passing from one part of the thinking substance to the next should not excite any other idea which had been impressed there, as well as the one with which that vibration had been originally associated, or why it should not by one general impulse equally excite them all. It is like supposing that you
Schelling and Hazlitt on disinterestedness and freedom 143 might tread on a nest of adders twined together, and provoke only one of them to sting you. (Howe, i, 55) Perhaps, as in chemical elements, the nervous impression stored in a cell is charged so that it will have an affinity only with a certain set of similarly charged impressions and will not be attracted by others. Even if an ‘elective affinity’ correctly described ‘the greater readiness with which the idea of a particular impression recalls the memory of another impression which coexisted with it in a state of sensible excitement’, Hazlitt objected, that fact would merely reassert the claims of association and would not explain how the special ‘elective’ charge came to be embedded (Howe, i, 55). Although he does not dismiss the possibility of an ‘elective affinity’ in the organic process of the brain, Hazlitt judged the appeal to biochemistry useless without an informed understanding of how it might affect perception and recollection.10 In trying to solve the problem of how memory’s seemingly magical retrieval system might operate, Hazlitt poses as example a simple experience: If from the top of a long cold barren hill I hear the distant whistle of a thrush which seems to come up from some warm woody shelter beyond the edge of the hill, this sound coming faint over the rocks with a mingled feeling of strangeness and joy, the idea of the place about me, and the imaginary one beyond will all be combined together in such a manner in my mind as to become inseparable. (Howe, i, 56) But how should the manifold impressions unite into one memory? In Hartley’s theory, the sensory responses are conveyed by vibrations ‘along different nerves to different and very remote parts of the brain’ (Howe, i, 56). Perhaps there is a double storage, so that ‘all ideas impressed at the same moment of time may be supposed to be assigned to particular compartments of the brain as well as where the external objects are contiguous’ (Howe, i, 56). But even double storage would be inadequate to the task of linking together the accompanying feelings (‘strangeness and joy’) and imaginary speculations (‘some warm woody shelter’) that were copresent in the original perceptual moment. Another possibility is that within consciousness there is a constant dynamic flux that moves freely among the storage cells of the brain. Sensory data may be stored in appropriate categories, but there may also be ‘conscious ideas’ that ‘are not confined to a particular spot in the circumference of the brain, but affect the general principle of thought, whatever this may be, whether composed of extended, material parts, or indivisible’ (Howe, i, 57). Hazlitt conjectured that these ‘conscious ideas’ mediate all the activity of thought ‘continually posting backwards and forwards like couriers in all
144 Frederick Burwick directions through all quarters of the brain to meet each other and exchange accounts’ (Howe, i, 57). If this should be the case, Hazlitt noted, then ‘conscious ideas’ are the ‘only instruments of association’, and Hartley’s theory collapses (Howe, i, 57). Certain that ‘there is no regular local arrangement of our ideas to correspond exactly with the order in which they cohere together in the mind’, and also that when they manifest themselves ‘they all belong absolutely to the same place or internal seat of consciousness’, Hazlitt proposed several alternatives to Hartley’s account: 1) that once they are stored in the brain, the impressions themselves become active agents of consciousness; or 2) that allied impressions carry some element that binds them together by ‘elective affinity’; or 3) that there is multiple storage within the brain; or 4) that free roving ideas within consciousness call forth the dormant ideas stored in cells (Howe, i, 57). He settled on none of these alternatives as ultimately satisfactory. Although he was leery of the ‘material hypothesis’ and complained that Hartley was ‘always the physiologist rather than the metaphysician’, Hazlitt nevertheless realized that a metaphysical explanation could never solve the problem of mind as an entity apart from the brain (Howe, i, 59). Thus his proposals on how memories might be retrieved within consciousness adhere to the contemporary science of the brain. Hazlitt referred to accounts of memory in Descartes and Hartley. Thomas Willis, in his Cerebri anatome (1664), correctly distinguished the functions of the cerebrum (organization of sensory perception, memory, imagination, volition) and the cerebellum (coordination of body movement). He was the first to identify the role of corpus striatum with motor functions. Unlike Descartes, Willis refused to separate mind and body, and thus prepared the way for further study of brain anatomy, even at a time when adherents to a Cartesian dualism persisted in a quest for the ‘seat of the soul’.11 Following Hartley’s Observations (1749), Franz Joseph Gall must be credited for major work in brain anatomy in spite of Jakob Ackermann’s subsequent discrediting of Gall’s phrenological doctrine.12 Johann Christian Reil published his first work on the anatomy of the brain and the nervous system in 1795; his studies on the relation of the ganglion system in relation to the cerebral system and on the function of the cerebrum appeared during the years immediately following Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action, but not too late to influence Schelling’s work.13 Schelling was familiar, too, with the contemporary work of Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer and Karl Friedrich Burdach.14 Schelling objected that Kant’s account of cognitive processes started out dynamic but then implicated a Higher Mechanism. Schelling advocated instead a Higher Physics that was informed by dynamic processes essentially identical to those which animated organic being and human consciousness itself.15 The dynamic processes of individual consciousness were possible only in a universe of dynamic processes. Throughout nature Schelling observed a vital process of particularization and individualization of living
Schelling and Hazlitt on disinterestedness and freedom 145 organisms. That process was evident in the lower life forms, and even in the most highly developed of human organs – the brain. A manifestation of the very energies that pervade the entire universe, the brain has evolved into a highly particularized and individualized organ. That tendency of evolution is evident throughout organic nature.16 Because the human body and brain developed as particularized manifestations of electricity, magnetism, and galvanism in organic form, they were subject to the same principles of polarity. As related to the galvanic excitation, Schelling cited the polarity of ‘sensibility’ and ‘irritability’ in the medical pathology of Albrecht Haller and John Brown. He also referred to Pfaff’s studies of ‘animal electricity’, the polarity of light in Newton’s Optics, and the polarity of colour perception in the physiological optics of Goethe.17 Schelling avoided the mind/brain or mind/body dualism of Descartes. The relative lack of research into the sensibility/irritability of the internal senses (such as govern perception, imagination, attention, memory, thought, judgement, delirium, emotion, will, pain, pleasure, desire, sleep, dreams) Schelling attributed to a prevailing prejudice that these were beyond the scope of empirical experience. As a philosopher, he claimed for himself the right to inform the transcendental with an understanding of the physiological. Not sensibility, per se, but sensibility observed in terms of an opposing irritability may reveal the moving factors involved in the actions and reactions of the brain.18 Amidst the complexity of the higher organism, Schelling acknowledged an independency and an interdependency of sensory organs. The eye, for example, can only function in relation to the entire organism. Nevertheless, it has a life of its own, a freedom and independence. Without a volitionally conscious decision in the brain to look to the left or to the right, the eye will spontaneously track a movement, seek to recover an obscured detail, squint or avert from a sudden bright flash. In short, the eye reveals its own sensibility/irritability and its own independent responsiveness. The freedom, the abilities, the perceptual capacities and limitations of the eye may also be discovered in our images and conceptions, which partake of the eye’s life and freedom but add the attributes of their own life and freedom, their own capacities and limitations (S3: 442). In his essay on Human Freedom, Schelling addressed the apparent paradox of a causal determinism of material things and the possibility of free will, and even more problematic: how evil could subdue the free will of individuals. As part of this argument, Schelling had to oppose precisely the same counter-arguments confronted by Hazlitt: the reductively mechanistic account of memory offered by associationism; a form of individualism that entrapped human action in self-serving egoism. Helvétius dismissed claims of disinterested charity as a disingenuous pose. Even when disinterestedness was granted by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, the altruistic act was said to be exercised only through overcoming the naturally self-serving instincts. In spite of the mind-centred shift of his ‘Copernican revolution’, Kant argued that the agency of the self was not thus ensconced as the dominating centre
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of consciousness: it remained, rather, a derived phenomenon of apperception. Hazlitt and Schelling followed by similarly divesting the self of its primal authority in consciousness, thus making room for a natural distancing of self-interest in ethical or aesthetic judgement. At the beginning of the Critique of Judgement, Kant distinguishes between the pleasures of intellectual freedom and those of physically determined appetites. Thus, when he turns to the analysis of aesthetic judgement, he can declare that the pleasure which determines aesthetic judgement is completely disinterested (K10: 116, § 2). In his note to this statement he explains that aesthetic judgement certainly has interest in the object itself but that it disregards any interest that might derive from external sources, such as the tickle of the senses (K10: 116, § 2 n5). The act of ethical or aesthetic judgement maintains its freedom precisely because of its independence from external dictates (K10: 106, section IX). The same freedom is attained in the imagination, and that freedom is not curtailed by the laws of association, which apply only to the empirical functions of the imagination (K10: 106, 250). The imagination is free in its productive and reproductive modes; the understanding, however, asserts the constraining laws. The understanding maintains its autonomy only in conforming to its own laws. This ‘free’ adherence to internal laws is what Kant calls ‘purposiveness without purpose’. While the laws of association would leave pleasure in the imagination physically dependent, the judgement, which is disinterested, liberates aesthetic pleasure. Associations as associations are mechanical. However as soon as they enter into the interplay of reason and imagination, the mechanics of association may be modulated by other factors, such as harmony and melody, proportion and balance. When an object is viewed simply as an object, the laws of association prevail; when considered intuitively, it becomes either symbolic or schematic: symbolic when beauty is seen to represent a moral good; schematic when it is judged exclusively in terms of its own internal laws (K10: 160–1, 195–6, 267–8, 291, 295). Schelling objected that Kant was so persuaded by total subjectivity of all thought that he acknowledged only human reason and saw no reason at all in nature. For Kant mind was dynamic and nature thoroughly mechanical. Reasserting the dynamic creativity in nature, Schelling had earlier argued the identity of mind and nature as kindred constellations of dynamic energy. In his essay on Human Freedom, he argues the identity in terms of the inextricable involvement of both mind and nature in the paradox of necessity and freedom (S3: 429). A challenge to the relationship of necessity and freedom in human consciousness was posed by the laws of association as formulated by Hartley; an almost opposite challenge to the relationship of necessity and freedom in external nature was posed by those laws as interpreted by David Hume. Schelling agreed with Kant that the applicability of the laws of association was merely incidental and not everywhere applicable to the processes of memory, reason, and imagination. Hume, in his presentation of association by resemblance, contiguity, and causation, readily granted that
Schelling and Hazlitt on disinterestedness and freedom 147 these were not infallible, nor even the sole cause of union among ideas. He introduced another problem in claiming that these associations were the mind’s way of ordering experience and may not belong universally to external nature. Causation is neither intuitively nor demonstratively certain.19 He did not, of course, deny the possibility of a universal causality, he argued rather that causality could be demonstrated but that universal causality could not be proven. One might expect Schelling to embrace, as did Kant, the notion that temporal sequence is constructed by the mind. In fact, in his response to Hume, he intends to derive a proof of the necessity of succession from mental action, and to relate this perception of succession to the external world itself.20 Causal determinism is absolutely essential to Schelling’s notion of human freedom. To say that human actions are causally determined, however, does not exclude the possibility that they may be self-determined. It matters not that one was either purposely or accidentally good or evil; rather, it matters whether one acted with or against one’s will. That Judas betrayed Christ is a fact that neither Judas nor anyone else can alter. But in the moment of his betrayal he acted with no coercion, but wilfully and of his own free choice. Similarly, even when the consequences are good, it is not a question whether they were purposely or accidentally good, but rather that the choices and actions were free of external force. The threat of the gates of hell would not have altered the determination of Judas. As the arena of thoughts, images, and self-awareness, the consciousness knows no other determination than that which arises from its own nature – thus feelings of guilt or shame incurred in the past might condition a present choice. The causality is internalized (S3: 482). But are guilt and shame any more ‘internal’ than, say, hunger or thirst, lust or appetite, desire for approval or comfort? In other words, does not the very condition of being human and a part of human society impose certain demands that determine choice? Is self-determination only an illusion? In addressing inseparability of necessity and freedom, Schelling grants that unless freedom can be defined in the context of a total world-view, then the concept will remain so unstable as to be useless. Implicated in the total world, the paradox of necessity and freedom challenges and gives crucial leverage to the meaning of will, but also to reason, deliberation, and choice. Reason would become as irrelevant in a world of absolute freedom as it would in a world of absolute determination (S3: 430, 432–4). Because he was blessed, or cursed, with a far more profound religious sensibility than Schelling, Coleridge had to that degree a far more difficult time in working out the implications of that identity which Schelling had posited between the ‘finite I’ and the ‘absolute I’. Thomas McFarland has described Coleridge’s struggle with the opposition of the omnipotent, omnipresent ‘I AM’ and the finite, material ‘it is’.21 As Schelling readily acknowledged, the concept of freedom is incompatible with pantheism. With the immanence of God in all things, no freedom could abide but that
148 Frederick Burwick freedom which is the divine will. Schelling declares that his own Identityphilosophy is not pantheistic, nor is Spinoza’s philosophy pantheistic, but rather fatalistic. The difficulty in Spinoza’s philosophy was not that he posited the immanence of God in all things, but that he granted infinite substance to the universe of things. God loses godhead in this infinite thingness, and Spinoza obliterates freedom, and pantheism too, in a scheme of total determinism (S3: 441, 445). To affirm freedom, Schelling required the counter-force of necessity; to maintain individual identity, Schelling must avoid the extremes of pantheism and absolute determinism. Claiming his philosophical ground in idealism, Schelling cautions against the naïve affirmations of activity, life and freedom, as in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, which fail to come to terms with any obstacles. It is precisely the obstacles which make it possible to recognize and define freedom, just as darkness makes it possible to recognize and define light. Without necessity, no freedom; without resistance, no activity. Schelling locates the principle of resistance, the principle of independence, in the ‘an-sich’. Kant had defined the noumenal essence or identity of a thing as the ‘Ding-an-sich’, the thing-in-itself. For Kant, the ‘Ding-an-sich’ remained inaccessible to human perception, which was capable only of registering the data of the senses, the phenomenal attributes rather than the thing-in-itself. For Schelling, the ‘an-sich’ was the marker of independence. Thus in his theory of art he advocated ‘Kunst-an-sich’, art-initself – a concept which became translated as ‘l’art pour l’art’ in subsequent nineteenth-century aesthetics.22 Precisely because the ‘an-sich’ remains indeterminate to the human understanding, it also keeps its integrity as uninfluenced by social, political, or personal schemes. Freedom exists in the positive concept of the ‘an-sich’ (S3: 446–8). At this juncture, Schelling asks the question that Hazlitt asked: how is disinterested benevolence possible? Like Hazlitt, Schelling, too, dismisses the possibility that actions are determined by an associationist scheme of response and memory. More problematic for Schelling, however, is how the self is liberated from self-serving egocentrism. Freedom, if it is truly freedom, might potentially serve good or evil purposes, selfish interests as well as the needs of others. Freedom in service to self-gratification and exploitation of others quickly ceases to surrender its freedom to the bondage of material substance (S3: 448–9). There is a will to evil, Schelling grants, but such a perversion of the will is a moral sickness, a decentering of consciousness. He calls it a sickness for it is marked by the same delusionary misapprehension of reality that affects the minds of the mentally ill. As the deranged understanding persists in the wrong choices, the moral consciousness becomes increasingly unsatisfied, discontent, and disoriented (S3: 462–3).23 Benevolence, as free and disinterested action, can neither be mimicked as a fashionable mode, nor taught as a moral lesson. To be sure, there were many who imitated the sensitivity and sensibility of Henry Mackenzie’s character in The Man of Feeling (1771), and Johann Bernhard
Schelling and Hazlitt on disinterestedness and freedom 149 Basedow’s school for Philanthropists (1774) provided useful instruction in rational humanitarianism. Neither, however, addressed the fundamental nature of disinterested benevolence; worse, Philanthropism presented a false view of the source and propagation of evil. Evil does not arise in sensuality, animality, or earthly materialism, nor can it be vanquished by following the reason and suppressing the desires. Because they are natural and necessary to survival, appetites, urges, and animal drives cannot be condemned as evil. The cause is rather to be sought in the perversion of the will (S3: 467–8, 472). Schelling considers the evidence of a pervasive causality, in spite of Hume’s argument, as persuasive proof that determinism prevails over indeterminism in the external order of things. If the concept of freedom meant that the individual had the power to resist or defy the laws of causality, then that freedom would be no more than a disruptive assertion of accident or caprice in the scheme of necessity. Individual will is not pitted against determinism, rather it works within it. Freedom is inner necessity, the action of being ‘an-sich’. If the individual then acts in accord with inner nature, or following that part of external necessity which is subsumed in the Identity of self and nature, the act is free so long as it arises from the laws of one’s own being, and is not determined by any other factor. In the concept of inner necessity Schelling claims that the opposition of freedom and necessity is resolved. Inner necessity is independent of the causally determined scheme operating outside the self (S3: 479–81). With his concept of freedom as inner necessity, Schelling explained how the disinterested act is possible. But how might it also be a benevolent act? Schelling answered that, as a creature of nature, the human being is naturally good. Evil is a social phenomenon. Philanthropy and misanthropy both describe the individual’s relationship to society as conditioned by society. Schelling approved Kant’s explanation that evil arises and is perpetuated in acts of victimization and exploitation, but he also defined an evil that results from an imbalance of the inner order (K10: 203–4). Benevolent action is the natural expression of human freedom, for it respects the freedom of others (S3: 484–5). But Schelling also acknowledged a false imagination (falsche Einbildung) that is so inward focused (eingebildet) that it loses balance and lapses into a delusory solipsism. It opens itself up to non-being, to the fabrication of lies and falsehood and thus imperils the freedom of interaction. The good and benevolent require that consciousness and intellect remain open to the immediate present of being. True freedom is in the unity of self and necessity (S3: 487–8). In developing the systematic implications of his ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy, Kant described the parhelion of self-consciousness. Because apperception can never witness the noumenal entity that generates its activity, the ‘self’ is always a mental construct in a state of flux. Schelling, too, posited a ‘self’ that functioned in response to others rather than as arbitrary dictator impelled by its own need and greed. Kant’s philosophy
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offered no guarantees that human beings would act unselfishly. He simply claimed that the mind was informed by rational awareness of right and wrong. His ‘categorical imperative’ provided the ground for moral decisions, not an assurance that the individual would adhere to that morality. Similarly, he described the possibility of aesthetic judgement based on disinterestedness, with no assurance that an individual would surrender sensual desires in looking at a work of art. In his lectures ‘On Self-Love’ and ‘On Liberty and Necessity’, from the Lectures on English Philosophy (1812), Hazlitt placed his concern with ‘Human Action’ in the same context that informs Schelling’s deliberations on ‘Human Freedom’ (Howe, ii, 215–45; 245–69). Both responded to the ideological shifts manifested in the French revolution and the Napoleonic Empire. The French, from Schelling’s perspective, were largely responsible for the mechanistic errors in ethics and aesthetics (S3: 431, 444).24 The new ego-centrism might empower an assertive individualism, a demand for democracy and individual rights, but it could also produce the ethics of selfgratification posited by Helvétius and imaginatively exploited by the Marquis de Sade. Hazlitt in 1805 and Schelling in 1809 both emphasized the role of the imagination in the moral act. Among peoples who had little other freedom, the adage ‘Thoughts are free’ had long been cherished.25 When deterministic and mechanistic philosophies had assaulted that last bastion of freedom, Hazlitt and Schelling both saw the need to ground their arguments on the independence of mental processes from the dictates of external influence as well as from a self-serving egoism.
11 ‘A Nature Towards One Another’ Hazlitt and the inherent disinterestedness of moral agency A.C. Grayling Hazlitt had been trying to write his then-intractable ‘metaphysical chokepear’, the Essay on the Principles of Human Action, for several years before his celebrated visit to Coleridge and Wordsworth in Somerset in the summer of 1797. During that visit he made a walking tour along the Bristol Channel with Coleridge as far as Linton, where, while staying at the village inn, they were told by a local fisherman that a boy had drowned off Linton beach the previous day, and that the villagers had tried to save him at peril of their own lives. When asked why they had taken such a risk the fisherman said ‘he did not know how it was that they ventured, but, Sir, we have a nature towards one another’ (xvii, 121). Coleridge turned to Hazlitt and remarked that this was a fine illustration of Hazlitt’s theory of natural disinterestedness, which the latter had been explaining to him during the course of that summer (xvii, 113–14). When Hazlitt at last completed his Essay, seven years after the Bristol Channel walk, he did not adduce empirical support for his thesis of the kind offered by the fisherman. He might well have done so, for such support abounds, and bears positively on the central contention he seeks to establish. But as Hazlitt’s writings also richly attest, the norm in human social action is not disinterestedness, but many motivations and causes typically at odds with it: egoism, envy, hatred, pride, ignorance, even ‘a secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind’, all of which Hazlitt repeatedly attacks (xii, 128). If we knew only the writings Hazlitt published in his lifetime, it would seem that the pessimistic and dispirited moral tone of his Plain Speaker (1825) essays (‘On Envy’, ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’, ‘On Egotism’ chief among them; xii) marked a change of mind, or at least a decay in his earlier passionate adherence to the doctrine of natural – that is: inherent, innate – disinterestedness. Moreover, in one of those Plain Speaker essays, ‘On Personal Character’ his express and emphatic defence of the nature side in the nature/nurture debate, although itself implied by the disinterestedness doctrine, appears paradoxically to bear directly against it. For whereas ‘disinterestedness’ meant for Hazlitt, as it did for Hume and Butler, natural benevolence, taking the nature side in the nature/nurture debate entails that human beings are naturally disposed to the many vices
152 A.C. Grayling which make the human condition fit Hazlitt’s graphic and brilliantlywrought description of it in Common Places no. LXI, where he invites the misanthrope to exercise his spleen on ‘that long disease, human life, on that villainous compound, human nature’ (xx, 132). And note that it is a concomitant of minimizing the role of nurture (which must include not just upbringing and experience but volition) on character, that character is therefore unmodifiable except with difficulty; Hazlitt indeed argues, consistently with his naturalistic premise, that people will always remain true to natural type (see ‘Of Personal Character’ and below). Yet before one can take the easy option of thinking the doctrine of the Essay a youthful expression of idealism which exposure to life soured, so that in effect Hazlitt changed his mind, one has only to read his best setting-out of the disinterestedness view: ‘Self-Love and Benevolence’, written in 1828. Here Hazlitt plays Teucer to Joseph Butler’s Ajax, firing his arrows from behind Butler’s Sermons at the Rolls Chapel, which he cites (as indeed he does in the appendix to the Essay, entitled ‘Some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvétius’) as the locus classicus of the refutation of the self-love doctrine. Unshaken adherence to the doctrine is stated also in Hazlitt’s equally late ‘Outlines of Morals’, so it is clear that he himself did not take his animadversions on the moral state of mankind to contradict his commitment to the natural disinterestedness of the human mind (xx, 376). Indeed, he says as much: in his ‘Aphorisms on Man’ he tells us ‘I believe in the theoretical benevolence, and practical malignity of man’ (no. xlvi, xx, 343) despite also quoting, in the same source, ‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand’ (no. xxix, xx, 338) and ‘No one … does not secretly prefer himself to the whole universe beside’ (no. xxiv, xx, 337). But Aphorism XLVI does not get rid of what is obviously a problem here: rather, it poses it more sharply. Clearly, Hazlitt’s observations on humanity’s moral condition are astute if characteristically hard. He is committed to the idea that personality is inherited and therefore, as regards each given individual, innate and largely unmodifiable; a fortiori, that malice, envy, ‘secret affinity’ for evil, and the rest, are a matter of natural endowment. Yet he is committed to the thesis that the well-springs of human action do not lie in innate self-interestedness. Given that his arguments on this last head are, with one important modification, convincing (I return to this below) – not least in premising the ‘metaphysical discovery’ he justly took pride in, viz. the role of the concept of personal identity in the debate – there is at least some unravelling to be done in clarifying Hazlitt’s position. The answer, I think, lies in forcing a revision, or better: an extension, to Hazlitt’s view, either or both by (a) challenging his secondary view that inherited personality is largely unmodifiable, or (b) developing his recognition that human nature is a ‘mingled yarn’ (he approvingly quotes the phrase from Shakespeare), by allowing that human nature is both naturally disinterested and self-interested – that is, by allowing that ‘having a nature towards others’ and being often and in many circumstances partial in one’s
‘A nature towards one another’ 153 interests (as e.g. to self, family, tribe, nation, versus the interests of those who count as outsiders from the relevant point of view), are consistent. Hazlitt himself says enough in favour of both (a) and (b) to make plausible a marriage of his disinterestedness thesis with versions of either or both of these points. Once done, it becomes a matter of recognizing that (if (a) alone is true together with natural disinterestedness) that an individual can learn to act contrary to his naturally disinterested feelings for others, so that nurture overrides or modifies nature, as in many other cases, e.g. personality propensities to aggression, lust, and anger; or (if (b) alone is true together with disinterestedness) that people will at times be disinterestedly motivated to act for the benefit of others, and at other times will act selfishly, and that what makes the difference is circumstances. Common observation seems to suggest that both (a) and (b) are right, and that therefore a full account of the springs of human moral action will allow a place for all three of (a), (b) and a natural propensity to wish for, and to act in the interests of, the good of others independently of one’s own interest in the case. Hazlitt, as noted, himself provides support for (a) and (b). In ‘Characteristics’ he says, ‘Egotism is an infirmity that perpetually grows upon a man, till at last he cannot bear to think of anything but himself, or even to suppose that others do’ (ix, 224). This unequivocally premises the idea that personality is modifiable through time and by experience. Hazlitt also took the view that such modification happens under instruction or example, as witness his views about the moral education of his son William, which among other things underwrote his practice of giving the boy a sizeable sum of money with the instruction to spend it all before nightfall, on the grounds that doing so would teach him not to be miserly. If it be pointed out that Hazlitt admitted the possibility of character modification in ‘Of Personal Character’, one need only reply that he there immediately added that a person would revert to natural type at the least opportunity – a view inconsistent with what he says of the egotist and what he taught his son. Moreover it is a key implication of Hazlitt’s theory of ‘gusto’ and sympathetic imagination that these outward-directed, objective, unselfish properties of character, manifested at the highest in great artists (he cites Shakespeare, Milton and Titian as paradigms, and their work as exemplary of the effects; see v, 53, 69–70), are not just the possession of the appropriately gifted, but a state to be striven for. In ‘On Egotism’ he says, describing what is in effect his version of the Aristotelian megalopsychos or magnanimous (great-souled) individual: The greater a man is, the less he necessarily thinks of himself, for his knowledge enlarges with his attainments. In himself he feels that he is nothing, a point, a speck in the universe, except as his mind reflects that universe, and as he enters into the infinite variety of the truth, beauty, and power contained in it. (xii, 164)
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If knowledge can enlarge with attainments, then a man can grow greater, that is, less egotistic. Literature and the arts aid in this; they take one ‘out of oneself’. The theatre, as a prime example, has as ‘the object and end of playing’ (an overstatement, but rhetorically forgivable) ‘to hold up the mirror to nature’, ‘to enable us to feel for others as for ourselves, or to embody a distinct interest out of ourselves by the force of imagination and passion’ (xii, 55). This is summed up in the wish of the poet: ‘To feel what others are, and know myself a man’ (xii, 54). The theatre could not teach if character were unmodifiable. That is the implication also of the remark, ‘In morals, the cultivation of a moral sense is not the last thing to be attended to – nay, it is the first’ (xii, 49). There is a vital contrast here with the negative process of character modification that narrows the focus of moral vision to the self and its welfare, which thereby become paramount, a process described by Hazlitt in the Essay as occurring because of the progressively limiting effects of sensation and memory (i, 42). The mechanisms by which attention concentrates on the self and its concerns are explained again by Hazlitt in ‘Self-Love and Benevolence’ in terms of what the philosophers call an ‘error theory’ regarding the projection of personal identity into the future. Misled (as Hazlitt would have it) by the conjunctive operation of memory and sensation, the former connecting the present self to the past, the latter making the present self-consciousness, we are led to project into the future the idea of the self as a substantial entity, which we therefore suppose to be the vehicle carrying our presently perceived self-interest forward. But since action can only relate to the future, and since there is no such thing as one’s ‘future self’, it follows that ‘your real self ends exactly where your pretended self-interest begins’, for in ‘calculating upon this principle’ (i.e. of the continuity of the present self with a supposed future self) ‘you are mocked with a name’ (xx, 172). Together these considerations serve to show how natural disinterestedness gives way to self-interest, and on what (mistaken, as Hazlitt has it) basis. Granting that the personality we are born with can be modified for good or ill allows us to hold that we are naturally disinterested but acquire selfishness to the degree that it can partly or wholly overlay the impulses of that natural moral endowment. As the foregoing suggests, Hazlitt himself seems to acknowledge this. If he does, the consistency of the disinterestedness doctrine with the jaundiced views found in the Plain Speaker is natural and explicable. So are they if one can allow what seems plain enough to common sense, that human beings have natural propensities to both disinterestedness and self-interestedness. A basis for incorporating this view with Hazlitt’s own appears to lie in his approving quotation of Shakespeare’s ‘life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together’ (All’s Well that Ends Well, 4.3.84), with which, giving it a reading as applying to character as well as or, in this instance, rather than, the course of a life, he ends his ‘Aphorism on Man’, no.
‘A nature towards one another’ 155 LXVII. This short piece is a comment on ‘the error of Mandeville’, which Hazlitt says he held in common with the Schoolmen and divines on one side, and misanthropes and sceptics on the other, and which lay ‘in concluding that man is a simple and not a compound being’ (xx, 349). Now, it is regrettable that in what is perhaps the least satisfactory version of his case for natural disinterestedness, namely in the Letter to William Gifford, Hazlitt makes the mistake of imputing to espousers of the self-interest theory a particularly crude version of this error. He there describes them as holding that there is some peculiar and abstracted principle which gives [the mind] an immediate, mechanical, and irresistible interest in whatever relates to itself, and which by the same rule shuts out and is a bar to the very possibility of our feeling not an equal, but any kind or degree of interest whatever, at any moment of our lives, in the history and fate of others. (ix, 52) Common observation refutes such a theory without need of philosophy, so here Hazlitt overstates his case by far; but by the same token as that by which he recognizes this error on his opponent’s part, Hazlitt cannot lurch to the opposite extreme of thinking that no-one is ever interested in his own welfare, but always and only in that of others. Since this too is demonstrably false, and since Hazlitt offers a psychogenetic account of how in practice people come to be self-interested, thus accepting what common observation tells us, it follows that he is right to adopt the ‘mingled yarn’ view as applied to character. But doing so implies that it is equally right to regard the moral endowment of human beings as a mixture of propensities, some to altruism and some to self-interest; and that is surely plausible. Moreover, it has been shown by J.L. Mackie in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (and not by him alone) that self-interest is frequently rational, frequently enlightened (in that it involves treating others well in one’s own present and future interests), and by various measures (including but not exclusively utilitarian ones) frequently the best course of action for a given circumstance. It is hard to imagine Hazlitt failing to see the force of such arguments, and indeed he could accept them without acceding to a ‘mingled yarn’ reinterpretation of his view of the basis of moral psychology. But clearly, to allow a natural capacity for self-interestedness alongside one for disinterestedness consorts better with the commonly observable facts of moral psychology, as the foregoing seeks to show; which implies that Hazlitt’s overall position would be better based on accepting what common sense and observation show, namely, that people are naturally capable of disinterestedness at times and naturally capable of self-interest at other times. Thus baldly stated, this proposition seems a truism. It was not one for Hazlitt. The reason that this did not seem a truism to Hazlitt is twofold. First, he was arguing against the entrenched and (to its proponents) seemingly irrefutable view that the natural propensity of human beings is to act out of
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self-interest, and that apparently altruistic action can always and easily be reinterpreted as self-interested. It would have been enough for Hazlitt to show in refutation that people are sometimes genuinely disinterested in their actions. But the metaphysical basis for his argument to that effect appeared to him to imply that the ground of all action is disinterested. A review of the argument and its force shows why he took this to be compelling; I undertake this shortly. But one can also show that although there is much importantly right about the argument (and moreover that it admits of significant empirical support of the fisherman variety), it does not entail that self-interest is not also innate to human beings. The disinterestedness thesis is simply stated. It is that people are interested in the welfare of others in the same way and for the same reasons as they are interested in their own. Hazlitt, as just noted, urged this in opposition to the then dominant view (still current in highly respectable quarters) that it is a matter of psychological fact that the fundamental motivation for people’s morally evaluable actions is self-interest; and further, that there is no other sound basis of justification for such action.1 Hazlitt’s argument, in summary, is as follows. We are interested in (that is: are concerned about, have a stake in) what has happened to us in the past, we are interested in what is happening now in the present, and we are interested in what will happen in the future. But it is only future events that can be the object of ‘rational or voluntary pursuit,’ because we cannot by any act of will alter the past or the actually occurring present which, even as we attend to it, slips into the past. We are therefore moral agents with respect to the future alone: we will, desire, plan and make choices about what is to happen in the next few minutes, hours, days or years. So when a person makes choices or plans, he can do so only for his future self. But his future self does not yet exist; and insofar as it can be imagined, it is metaphysically speaking on a par with other future selves – that is, with other people – and as such is another person. Hazlitt of course allows that we tend to prefer our own future interests over those of others, because we anticipate them with ‘greater warmth of present imagination’, an attitude framed by the fact that we think of ourselves as identical with ‘our future selves’. We do this because we take it that a person’s self-identity stretches into the future just as it stretches into the past: [the] greater liveliness and force with which I can enter into my future feelings … identifies them with my present being; and this notion of identity being once formed, the mind makes use of it to strengthen one’s habitual propensity, by giving to personal motives a reality and absolute truth. (i, 49) But because the future does not exist, and because therefore one’s future self does not exist, there is in strict truth nothing for one to be identical with in
‘A nature towards one another’ 157 the future; the projection of our past and present selves into the future is no more than an habitual fiction, an act of imagining a possible future self which, for each of us, we conceive as the continuation of the self which we are presented with by memory and present experience. But in fact our sole means of envisaging a future self is an act of sympathetic imagination. And here is the key point for Hazlitt: it is precisely by acts of sympathetic imagination that one understands other people too. He puts the point in a particularly interesting way, given later arguments in philosophy, by saying: having a conception of my future self, and being interested in its welfare, is exactly like understanding or sympathizing with another person; so if I were not able to do the latter, I could not do the former. My interest in my own welfare, therefore, is necessarily linked with my interest in the welfare of others (i, 1–2; 48–9). Two points in the foregoing require emphasis. One is Hazlitt’s view that consciousness of one’s personal identity – one’s consciousness of the continuance and integrity over time of one’s selfhood – exists only through sensation in the present and memory of the past, and that because the future does not exist, neither does a future self with whom one can literally be identical.2 The point is central to Hazlitt’s claim that whatever one thinks about or hopes for one’s future self, it is strictly speaking another self one is thinking about, logically on a par with any other self; and that the capacity to think about one’s future self requires that one be able to think about other selves in general. The other – and related – point is that Hazlitt’s argument anticipates certain more recent philosophical debates, one of which centres on the much-discussed argument offered by P.F. Strawson against scepticism about other minds.3 Strawson argues that one can only ascribe states of consciousness to oneself if one can ascribe them to others. The reason is that to doubt the existence of other minds a sceptic must employ the concept of ‘other minds’, but he can only do this of he can distinguish between ‘my states of consciousness’ and ‘others’ states of consciousness’; and this, in turn, can only be done if others exist, because the identification of conscious states can only be effected by reference to particulars of a special kind, viz. ‘persons’, the concept of which – in turn again – demands that there be criteria for distinguishing one person from another, for otherwise the identification of states of consciousness would not be possible. Accordingly, one can talk of ‘my experiences’ only if one can talk of others’ experiences; talk of others’ experiences is possible only if there are criteria for distinguishing between persons; and since one does talk significantly about one’s own experiences, there must be such criteria. Then if there are such criteria, bodily behaviour constitutes logically adequate criteria for ascribing states of conscious to others. So the sceptic’s doubts about the existence of other minds are idle, because even to articulate doubt about their existence he has to employ the discourse whose very conditions of employment legitimize what he wishes to call into question.4
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The parallels between Strawson’s and Hazlitt’s argument are noteworthy. Like Strawson, Hazlitt is in effect giving what is called a ‘transcendental argument’ a form of argument aimed at specifying the conditions necessary for something to be possible. Hazlitt’s argument states that it is a condition of being able to have an interest in one’s future self that one is capable of having an interest in others; and that since the interests served by action are all future, that is, all relate to our future selves, it follows that all interest is other-regarding, which is to say ‘disinterested’, for the reason that one’s future self is, literally as well as logically speaking, another self. Hazlitt treats ‘disinterested’ and ‘benevolent’ as synonyms for the purposes of his argument. Although the terms are not literally synonymous, they are indifferently interchangeable from the point of view of moral psychology, for the reason that in the normally rational person, right interest lies in the welfare of whichever self is the target of the interest in question. (The burden then shifts to identifying ‘right interest’ in the case.) So it is a corollary of Hazlitt’s view that rationally choosing to act in one’s own best interests is in fact, as well as in effect, acting benevolently towards another. The question arises whether disinterestedness or benevolence is ‘natural’, that is, an innate disposition. Here is where the empirical support of common observation enters. A simple thought-experiment is all that is required to establish it. Suppose you suddenly notice that there is a pile of bricks teetering on a wall ahead of you, and that it is just about to fall on someone (a stranger to you) passing beneath it. The natural and therefore almost universal impulse is to yell a warning. It would in fact be quite hard deliberately not to warn the stranger, a feat performable only by someone cruel or especially ill-intentioned. It might be easier to perform if you know the about-to-be victim and you especially dislike him. Otherwise the person who does not cry out instinctively or by reflex (note how natural it is to employ ‘instinctively’ and ‘reflex’) is probably paralysed by horror at what impends. An observation to this effect is implied by what Hazlitt says in ‘Self-Love and Benevolence’ when invoking the fact that ‘compassion or uneasiness on account of others enters [the mind] without leave’, and more fully by the discussion that follows, where he says, ‘The movements in my breast as much originate in, and are regulated by, the idea of what another feels, as if they were governed by a chord placed there vibrating to another’s pain’ (xx, 168, 169). The place of sympathy in the moral life is right to the fore here, as one would expect in Hazlitt; the fisherman’s story exemplifies it in action. But these considerations do not entail that other-regardingness is the only spring of action, or that disinterestedness, however natural a part of the inherent moral endowment of human beings as social animals, occupies all the logical space of motivation. To argue as much is implausible, even by Hazlitt’s lights, given what he says in (for example) the Plain Speaker essays cited – the ‘Characteristics’ and ‘Aphorisms on Man’ – and elsewhere. The evidence of the moral practice (one might say, with Hazlitt, dispraxis) of
‘A nature towards one another’ 159 humanity requires a theory which accommodates all its phenomena. By asserting exclusive disinterestedness Hazlitt’s argument deprives us of that. This observation prompts us to return to the key point in Hazlitt’s argument – the one which is original to him – namely, the metaphysical disjunction between the self, constituted by memory and consciousness, and a putative ‘future self’. Hazlitt’s point seems to me undeniable. But it is a mark of rationality to make the inductive assumption, defeasible though it is, that when time has passed there will be an individual whose memory and consciousness at that point determine for him that he is identical with one’s present self; and that that individual will be glad if one’s present self acted in ways justifiably calculated to benefit that individual. Implicit reliance on such induction is well explained by appeal to a natural propensity to project the self into the future, for even though such a self is a metaphysical fiction, it is a morally central one. And that thought, in turn, is enough to leave room for the suggestion that self-interest itself is as natural as altruism, and that it operates in given circumstances as compellingly as disinterestedness does in other circumstances. In fact, it would be hard to make coherent a moral psychology which took Hazlitt’s thesis in its exclusive guise seriously, for it would not accommodate the perceived facts of moral experience (in which self-interest abounds), nor provide rich enough materials for moral psychology to allow what is anyway central to much practical reasoning, viz. the competing merits of interested and disinterested claims on one’s moral endeavour.
Notes
Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action: A bibliographical note 1 For help and assistance, I thank Uttara Natarajan, Bruce Barker-Benfield of the Bodleian Library, and Dr David Wykes of Dr Williams’s Library. 2 Stanley Jones, Hazlitt: A Life – From Winterslow to Frith Street, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, p. 18. 3 Herschel Moreland Sikes, Willard Hallam Bonner and Gerald Lahey (eds), The Letters of William Hazlitt, New York: Macmillan, 1978, p. 63. 4 In his ‘Project for a New Theory of Civil and Criminal Legislation’, Hazlitt said that the essay was written in 1792 and that Corrie ‘may still have the rough draught of this speculation’ (Howe, xix, 302–3). 5 Hazlitt, Letters, p. 70. This differs from the suggestion given by Hazlitt’s grandson that ‘The author began to make notes for the volume as early as 1798’, in W. Carew Hazlitt, Four Generations of a Literary Family, 2 vols, London, 1897, vol. i, p. 79. A date of 1796 is supported by Hazlitt’s son, who says that ‘it was at the age of eighteen that he begun the first rough sketch of his “Principles of Human Action”’ (Literary Remains of the Late William Hazlitt, ed. W.C. Hazlitt, 2 vols, London, 1836, vol. i, p. xxxvii). 6 W.C. Hazlitt (ed), Literary Remains, vol. i, p. lii. 7 For more on Johnson see Leslie F. Chard II, ‘Joseph Johnson: Father of the Book Trade’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 79.1, 1975, 51–82; Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979; and more recently Helen Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing, and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 8 Geoffrey Keynes, Bibliography of William Hazlitt, 2nd edn, Godalming: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1981, p. 1. 9 Henry Crabb Robinson, Reminiscences, vol. 1, 1790–1809, f. 115. The passage can be found in Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. E.J. Morley, 3 vols, London: J.M. Dent, 1938, vol. i, p. 6. For permission to quote from the Henry Crabb Robinson papers I am grateful to Dr David Wykes, Librarian of Dr Williams’s Library, on behalf of the Trustees. 10 See Robinson’s letter to his brother Thomas, c. 1799, in Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3 vols, London: Macmillan, 1869, vol. i, p. 57. 11 Ibid., p. 58. 12 For information on Ostell I am indebted to his descendants: Peter Ostle, Joan Palmer and Pauline Harkness. 13 Henry Crabb Robinson, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. E.J. Morley, 3 vols, London: J.M. Dent, 1938, vol i, pp. 386–7. 14 Henry Crabb Robinson, Correspondence, vol. 4, 1805–8, f. 85 (Dr Williams’s Library).
Notes 161 15 Herschel Baker, William Hazlitt, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962, p. 140. 16 William Godwin, MS diary for 1804, Bodleian Library Dep. e. 207, 19v. Quoted by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 17 See William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family, London: Faber, 1989, p. 64. 18 See my ‘William Hazlitt (1737–1820), the Priestley Circle, and The Theological Repository: A Brief Survey and Bibliography’ in Review of English Studies, forthcoming 2006. 19 See Monthly Repository 1, June 1806, 334, under ‘Religious, Literary, and PoliticoReligious Intelligence’: ‘The Rev. W. Hazlitt, A.M. proposes to publish, by subscription, Fifty-two Sermons, in two octavo volumes, price 16s. in boards. Subscribers’ names are taken by Mr. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church-yard, and by the Printer of the Monthly Repository’. The printer was Caleb Stower, whose offices were at 32 Paternoster Row. 20 See Jones, Hazlitt: A Life, p. 6. 21 The date is that given by Stanley Jones in his review of Keynes, in Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography VI.4, 1982, 272–6: 276. 22 Keynes, Bibliography, p. 1. 23 In addition to which, I can report that there is a copy at Glasgow University Library and another in my possession bearing the ownership inscription of B.W. Procter (see frontispiece to this volume). 24 W. Carew Hazlitt (ed.), Memoirs of William Hazlitt, 2 vols, London, 1867, vol. i, p. 112. 25 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs, 6 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71, vol. ii, pp. 951–2. 26 See Hazlitt to Johnson, July 1807, in Hazlitt, Letters, p. 92. Although the portrait does not appear in the catalogue of Hazlitt’s paintings published by Hazlitt’s grandson (W.C. Hazlitt (ed.), Memoirs of William Hazlitt, vol. i, p. xvi), it may be the one now in the possession of descendants of Joseph Johnson that has come to my attention at the time of writing. 27 For its second edition in May 1818 the volume passed to Taylor and Hessey; the circumstances of the transfer are not known. 28 Not 1835, as is sometimes claimed in library catalogues. 29 It also contained, for the first time, ‘On Abstract Ideas’, pp. 139–76. 30 W.C. Hazlitt (ed.), Memoirs of William Hazlitt, vol. ii, p. 272. 31 Barbara Rosenbaum and Pamela White, Index of English Literary Manuscripts Volume IV 1800–1900 Part 2 Hardy-Lamb, London: Mansell, 1982–90, p. 229. Introduction: Hazlitt’s Essay on the Principles of Human Action, 1805–2005 1 William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols, London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1930–4; unless otherwise stated all references to Hazlitt will be cited by volume and page in Howe. 2 Thomas De Quincey, Articles from Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (1834–8), in Alina Clej (ed.) vol. x of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003, p. 270. 3 Anon, review of An Essay on the Principles of Human Action, Annual Review 4, 1805, 657–64. 4 Anon, review of An Essay on the Principles of Human Action, The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 26, January 1807, 17–22: 18. 5 Stephen Jones, review of An Essay on the Principles of Human Action, Monthly Review 52, April 1807, 430–32; Anon, review of An Essay on the Principles of Human Action, Eclectic Review 3, August 1807, 698–704: 698. 6 S.T. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R.J. White, vol. vi of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen series no. 75, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972, p. 187. According to De Quincey, however, ‘C. used to assert’ that Hazlitt’s Essay was ‘derived
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entirely’ from him. See De Quincey, Works vol. x, p. 269. Ironically, as Grevel Lindop acknowledges, De Quincey himself plagiarized Hazlitt’s philosophical arguments in the Reply to Malthus (1807): see Grevel Lindop, The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, London: J.M. Dent, 1981, p. 267. Thomas Noon Talfourd, ‘Pulpit Oratory: The Rev. John Leifchild’, London Magazine 3, March 1821, 306–11: 307. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English, 2 vols, London: Richard Bentley, 1833, vol. 2, pp. 157, 162. Essays on the Principles of Human Action, edited by Hazlitt’s son William Carew Hazlitt, London: John Miller, was published in 1836. The volume reprints the Essay on the Principles of Human Action and the Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvétius with some alterations, based, it is claimed, on the author’s marginalia to the first edition. The essay ‘On Abstract Ideas’ is published here for the first time. [R.H. Horne], ‘Hazlitt’s First Essay’, Monthly Repository, new series 9, 1835, 480–5: 484. Richard Henry Horne (1803–84) can be identified as the author of this article from its subscription, ‘The Author of “The Exposition of the False Medium”’. Horne’s Exposition of the False Medium and Barriers excluding Men of Genius from the Public was published in 1833. Ibid., p. 481. Ibid., p. 481. Ibid., pp. 482–3. Horne is commenting on Hazlitt’s remark in the essay ‘On Great and Little Things’ in Table-Talk: ‘The only thing I ever piqued myself upon was the writing the Essay on the Principles of Human Action – a work that no woman ever read, or would ever comprehend the meaning of’ (viii, 237). Ibid., p. 483. [Edward Bulwer-Lytton], ‘Charles Lamb and Some of his Companions’, Quarterly Review 122.243, January 1867, 1–29: 11, 12. John M. Bullitt, ‘Hazlitt and the Romantic Conception of the Imagination’, Philological Quarterly 24.4, October 1945, 343–61: 343, 356. See Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946, pp. 176–7, and Criticism: The Major Texts (1952), enlarged edn, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, pp. 283–4. C.L. Finney, The Evolution of Keats’s Poetry, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936, vol. 1, p. 222. Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (1963), London: Chatto & Windus, 1979, p. 240. Herschel Baker, William Hazlitt, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962, p. 142. James Noxon, ‘Hazlitt as Moral Philosopher’, Ethics 73.4, July 1963, 279–83: 281. Leonard Trawick III, ‘Sources of Hazlitt’s “Metaphysical Discovery”’, Philological Quarterly 42.2, April 1963, 277–81: 278, 281. W.P. Albrecht, Hazlitt and the Creative Imagination, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1965, pp. 1, 26. Kathleen Coburn, ‘Hazlitt on the Disinterested Imagination’, in J.V. Logan, J.E. Jordan, and N. Frye (eds), Some British Romantics: A Collection of Essays, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1966, pp. 167–88: 173–4. Roy Park, Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, p. 45. John Kinnaird, William Hazlitt: Critic of Power, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, pp. 56, 58, 61. David Bromwich, Hazlitt: the Mind of a Critic, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 17. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 54.
Notes 163 30 Donald M. Hassler, ‘The Discovery of the Future and Indeterminacy in William Hazlitt’, Wordsworth Circle 8.1, winter 1977, 75–9. 31 Ibid., pp. 77, 78. 32 Raymond Martin and John Barresi, ‘Hazlitt on the Future of the Self’, Journal of the History of Ideas 56.3, July 1995, 463–81: 464. The case made here is restated in, and central to, Martin and Barresi’s recent book, Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century, London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 33 Ibid., p. 476. 34 Ibid., p. 481. 35 Deborah Elise White, Romantic Returns: Superstition, Imagination, History, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000, pp. 65–6. 36 Ibid., p. 67. 37 Tim Milnes, Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 108.
1 Disinterested imagining and impersonal feeling 1 See Uttara Natarajan, Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, pp. 31–6, 78–92. 2 See David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 46–57. 3 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in A.S.B. Glover (ed.), Shelley, Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters, London: Nonesuch Press, 1951, p. 1032. 4 William Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’, ll. 80–1. 5 William Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982, Act III, ll. 1539–44, p. 215. 6 P.B. Shelley, ‘On a Future State’, in Glover (ed.), Selected Poetry, Prose, and Letters, p. 981. 7 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, p. 135. 8 See Dizzy Gillespie, ‘Minton’s Playhouse’, in Robert Gottlieb (ed.), Reading Jazz, New York: Pantheon Books, 1996, p. 557: ‘Roy [Eldridge] used to come by Minton’s. Roy is the most competitive musician. Roy used to shower trumpet players with chops and speed. I’ll never forget the time, the first time, Roy heard me make an altissimo B-flat. Boy, his eyes went up. I always had my speed, but didn’t have too much chops. But I was getting them together at that time. One time, we were playing “Sweet Georgia Brown”, in A-flat. I played about two choruses and hit a high B-flat. Roy looked!’ 9 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in L.A. Selby-Bigge (ed.) Enquiries, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, section vi, p. 58. 10 See Roy Park, Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
2 Hazlitt and the idea of identity 1 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896, pp. 252–3. 2 Students of national identity like Michael Warner and Benedict Anderson have shown how the abstracting powers of print enable us, in Warner’s words, ‘to imagine a community simultaneous with but not proximate to ourselves: separate persons having the same relation to a corporate body realized only metonymically’, in The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 112. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991.
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3 John Kinnaird, William Hazlitt: Critic of Power, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, p. 302. 4 Charles Richard Sanders et al. (eds), The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, 31 vols published, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1977–2004, vol. 6, p. 88. 5 John Stuart Mill, The Spirit of the Age, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942, p. 1. 6 Quoted in Geraldine Pelles, Art, Artists and Society: Origin of a Modern Dilemma; Painting in England and France, 1750–1850, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963, p. 31. 7 Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions, Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, p. 204. 8 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, New York: Methuen, 1982, pp. 81; 133–4. 9 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, London: Sheed & Ward, 1975, p. 257.
3 ‘The future in the instant’: Hazlitt’s Essay and Shakespeare 1 David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999, p. 195. 2 In Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T.S. Dorsch, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, p. 136. 3 For the relation to Hazlitt’s love of Romeo and Juliet as a fast, youthful play see Philip Davis, ‘Nineteenth-Century Juliet’, in Shakespeare Survey 49, 131–40. 4 See Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit, London: J. Johnson, 1777, pp. xxxvii–xxxviii and sections 1 and 2 passim. 5 See my Sudden Shakespeare, London: Athlone Press, 1996. 6 See Uttara Natarajan, Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, pp. 38–9 on the preponderance of terms taken from Newtonian mechanics: ‘where “power”, “impress”, “force”, “momentum” etc. are applied to intellectual activity in a manner that does appear closely analogous to their operation in the physical world … [Hazlitt’s] habitual recourse, not only to Newtonian terms, but to an apparently sense-oriented vocabulary, a vocabulary pertaining to “feeling” of various kinds, does not imply the sensory origin of intellectual activity. Rather, it grants to the purely intellectual a degree of actuality equal to, if not greater than, the impressions of the sense.’ 7 See in particular chapter 4, given here in Goethe, Elective Affinities, R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, pp. 52–3: ‘It needs little imagination … to see in these elementary forms people one has known. … Those natures which, when they meet, quickly lay hold on and mutually affect one another we call affined. This affinity is sufficiently striking in the case of alkalis and acids which, although they are mutually antithetical, and perhaps precisely because they are so, most decidedly seek and embrace each other, modify one another, and together form a new substance. … It is just this way that truly meaningful friendships can arise among human beings: for antithetical qualities make possible a closer and more intimate union.’ 8 Lord Kames, Henry Home, Elements of Criticism (1762), 3rd edn, with additions and improvements, 2 vols, Edinburgh and London: A. Kincaid and J. Bell, 1765, vol. i, part 3, p. 113. 9 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, in vol. ix (John Beer, ed.) of Collected Works, Bollingen series no. 75, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 267. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., pp. 267–8n, John Beer notes Kant, Schelling and Steffens as sources for ‘Wechselwirkung’. 12 On Hazlitt’s own application of the language of Priestley’s Unitarian science to art and the relation also to Coleridge and Humphry Davy, see Tom Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style, London: Faber & Faber, 1998, pp. 196–7: ‘The definite, the fixed, is death: the principle of life is the indefinite, the growing, the
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13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20
moving, the continuous.’ Paulin sees this fluidity, rapidity and potential for sudden fusion as a principle of free Protestant individualism in contrast to the set forms of the Catholic Church. Andrew Baxter, An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul, London: J. Bettenham, 1733, pp. i, xxiv. Baxter is here quoting Kenelm Digby from his Two Treatises (1640), chapter 16, paragraph 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907, vol. i, pp. 85–6. Compare Wordsworth in his Essay, Supplementary to the Preface: ‘Passion, it must be observed, is derived from a word which signifies suffering; but the connection which suffering has with effort, with exertion, and action, is immediate and inseparable’ (in W.J.B. Owen and J.W. Smyser (eds), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, vol. iii, pp. 81–2). The formulation is Shelley’s in his preface to Prometheus Unbound. See Rosemary Ashton, The German Idea, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, Chs 1 and 2. From an interview recorded in Ralph Berry, On Directing Shakespeare, London; Hamish Hamilton, 1989, pp. 149–50. Ibid. Ibid., p. 137.
4 Hazlitt and the selfishness of passion 1 Hazlitt’s disinterestedness has most recently been celebrated by A.C. Grayling in The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000, esp. pp. 362–5; and Tom Paulin in ‘Spirit of the Age’, The Guardian, 5 April 2003, where he refers to the ‘disinterested benevolence’ he ‘imbibed from Unitarianism and from Hutcheson’s philosophy and aesthetics’. 2 See Marilyn Butler, ‘Satire and the Images of the Self in Liber Amoris’, Yearbook of English Studies 14, 1984, 209–25; Robert Ready, ‘The Logic of Passion: Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris’, Studies in Romanticism 14, 1975, 41–57; Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 243–6; John Barnard, ‘Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris; or the New Pygmalion (1823): Conversations and the Statue’, in Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (eds), Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999, pp. 181–98. 3 Herschel Moreland Sikes, Willard Hallam Bonner and Gerald Lahey (eds), The Letters of William Hazlitt, New York: Macmillan, 1978, pp. 217–18. 4 Ibid., p. 222. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., pp. 225–6. 7 Ibid., p. 226. 8 Ibid., p. 231. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 232. 11 Ibid., p. 233. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., pp. 233–4.
5 Hazlitt and the ‘kings of speech’ 1 Tom Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style, London: Faber & Faber, 1998, p. 116.
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2 For which see Uttara Natarajan, Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals and the Metaphysics of Power, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, especially pp. 41–59. 3 Ibid., pp. 172–3. 4 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History 14’, in Illuminations (1955), ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968, p. 261. 5 Paulin, Day-Star of Liberty, pp. 260–1. 6 ‘The conversion of poetry into a mere or empty fiction by the sacrifice of its innate power is part of the general perversion of language for political ends’, in Natarajan, Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense, p. 172. See also Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England 1789–1832, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. 7 John Keats, The Letters of John Keats: 1814–1821, ed. H.E. Rollins, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958, vol. ii, p. 167. 8 A.C. Grayling compares Hazlitt’s moral theory to P.F. Strawson’s in Ch. 11, p. 157, while Strawson’s famous article ‘On Referring’ is comparably in the same tradition as Hazlitt’s philosophy of language, culminating in the conclusion: ‘for ordinary language has no exact logic’, in ‘On Referring’, Mind 59, 1950, 320–44.
6 The road to Nether Stowey 1 Sara Coleridge, Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge, 2 vols, London: Henry S. King & Co., 1873, vol. i, pp. 2–3. 2 See S.T. Coleridge, Table-Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, vol. xiv of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen series no. 75, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, vol. ii, p. 483. 3 S.T. Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs, 6 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71, vol. ii, p. 990. 4 Hazlitt mentions Cottle nowhere throughout his works. For his part, Cottle does not refer to Hazlitt in his Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (1847). 5 Throughout what follows I am much indebted to Uttara Natarajan’s lucid exposition of Hazlitt’s philosophy in Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals and the Metaphysics of Power, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 6 William Hazlitt, The Letters of William Hazlitt, Herschel Moreland Sikes, Willard Hallam Bonner and Gerald Lahey (eds), New York: Macmillan, 1978, p. 70. 7 Coleridge, Collected Letters, vol. i, p. 394. 8 Barron Field, Barron Field’s Memoirs of Wordsworth, ed. Geoffrey Little, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975, p. 66. 9 See Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1800–1815, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 104. 10 S.T. Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, Bollingen series no. 50, 5 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957–2002, vol. i, p. 868. The identification of the manuscript as Hazlitt’s is conjectural. 11 Ernest de Selincourt (ed.), The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787–1805, 2nd edn revised Chester L. Shaver, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967, p. 213. 12 Ibid., p. 212. 13 Coleridge, Letters, vol. iv, p. 574. 14 Discussed in W.J. Bate and J. Engell (eds), Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, vol. vii of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen series no. 75, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, vol. i, p. 196. 15 Coleridge, Letters, vol. i, p. 391. 16 Ibid. 17 On the few occasions when he does mention ‘The Recluse’, Hazlitt is invariably critical; see Howe xvi, p. 142; xvii, pp. 25, 59.
Notes 167 18 Letter to Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, in John Keats, The Letters of John Keats: 1814–1821, ed. H.E. Rollins, 2 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958, vol. i, p. 387. For more on Hazlitt’s influence on Keats’s critical views, see David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983, Chapter XI: ‘Keats’. 19 William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, W.J.B. Owen and J.W. Smyser (eds), 3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, vol. i, p. 117. 20 William Wordsworth, The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis, London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993, p. 36. 21 As with so much about the dating of Lyrical Ballads (1798), it is hard to be sure. But the Cornell Wordsworth Series editors say that they were written ‘probably on May 23 or soon after, almost certainly by June 12’, in William Wordsworth, ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and Other Poems 1797–1800, James Butler and Karen Green (eds), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992, p. 107. 22 Wordsworth, Prose Works, vol. iii, p. 5. 23 ‘Expostulation and Reply’, ll. 22–4. 24 From DC MS 14, 16r. Facsimile to be found in Wordsworth, ‘Lyrical Ballads’, pp. 114–15. 25 Coleridge, Letters, vol. i, p. 335. 26 Ibid., vol. i, p. 397. 27 Ibid., vol. i, p. 137. 28 Facsimile pages in Wordsworth, ‘Lyrical Ballads’, pp. 490–1. 29 ‘The Pedlar’, l. 341. 30 Line 371; for Coleridge’s later rejection of Hartley see Coleridge, Letters, vol. ii, p. 706. 31 Editors tend to overlook the fact that chapter and verse for Coleridge’s observation are given in Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. i, p. 327. 32 Coleridge, Letters, vol. i, pp. 385–6. That letter is correctly dated 6 February 1798, as John Beer argues in ‘A Coleridge Puzzle’, Notes and Queries 46, 1999, 457–8. 33 H.C. Robinson, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. E.J. Morley, 3 vols, London: J.M. Dent, 1938, vol. i, p. 6. 34 Coleridge, Letters, vol. i, p. 577. 35 Ibid., vol. i, p. 216. 36 William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991, vol. i, pp. 162–3. Nicholas Roe has discussed Wordsworth’s connection with Godwin in Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. 192–8. 37 Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. i, p. 1618. 38 Coleridge, Letters, vol. i, p. 335. 39 ‘The Pedlar’, ll. 335–7. 40 ‘The Tables Turned’, ll. 31–2. 41 ‘Nutting’, text in DC MS 15, ll. 39–43 42 Natarajan, Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense, p. 27. 43 Ibid., p. 28. 44 ‘I would not strike a flower’, ll. 14–15. 45 Ernest de Selincourt (ed.), The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, 1829–1834, 2nd edn revised Alan G. Hill, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979, vol. ii, p. 387.
7 One impulse: Hazlitt, Wordsworth and The Principles of Human Action 1 Raymond Martin and John Barresi, Naturalization of the Soul: Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 139. (For a more extensive discussion of the originality of Hazlitt’s Essay, see Martin and Barresi, ‘Hazlitt on the Future of the Self’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 56, 1995, 461–81.)
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2 Ibid. 3 William Hazlitt, Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols, London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998, hereafter cited as Wu with volume and page number. 4 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1798–1799, ed. Stephen Parrish, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. 5 For a discussion of Hardy’s use of the term see my study, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception, London: Macmillan, 1975, pp. 29–32. 6 William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Parrish, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991, p. 173, ll. 468–9. 7 Thomas Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. Sir William Molesworth, Bart., 11 vols, Aalen: Scientia, 1962, vol. iii, pp. 4–5. 8 Thomas De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop, 21 vols, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003, vol. xv, p. 142. De Quincey wrote Suspiria after Hazlitt’s death. It was published in 1848. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., vol. xv, p. 153. Other uses of the word ‘dislimn’ in De Quincey occur in volumes ii, p. 119; viii, p. 104; ix, pp. 64, 92; x, p. 330; xix, p. 345. 11 See Grevel Lindop, The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, London: Dent, 1981, p. 267. 12 William Cowper, ‘The Task’, in John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (eds), The Poems of William Cowper, 3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, vol. ii, p. 192, Book 4, ll. 202–4. 13 William Wordsworth, ‘Poems, in Two Volumes’ & Other Poems 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983, pp. 275–6, ll. 151–5. 14 William Wordsworth, ‘Lyrical Ballads’ and Other Poems 1797–1800, James Butler and Karen Green (eds), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992, p. 109, ll. 21–4.
8 Circle of sympathy: Shelley’s Hazlitt 1 Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers, ed. Robert Gittings, Fontwell: Centaur Press, 1969, p. 26. 2 Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (eds), 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, vol. i, 163. 3 See The Examiner of 26 September, 3 and 10 October 1819 and 9 June 1822; also Hunt’s letters to the Shelleys of 4 August 1818, 10–11 July 1821 (where he makes excuses for Hazlitt’s Table-Talk essay), and 28 August 1821 in Leigh Hunt, The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, ed. T. Hunt, 2 vols, London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1862, vol. i, pp. 124, 166, 169. Shelley acknowledges receipt of The Examiner of 26 October and 3 and 10 October 1819 in his letters of 15 October 1819 to Charles Ollier and of 2 November 1819 to Hunt, see P.B. Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F.L. Jones, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964, vol. ii, pp. 126, 134. 4 James Mulvihill, ‘Hazlitt, Shelley, and “The Triumph of Life”’, Notes and Queries 35.3 (233), September 1988, 305–7. The passage in Hazlitt to which Mulvihill refers is as follows: ‘It pursues its steady way, its undeviating everlasting course, “unslacked of motion,” like that foul Indian idol, the Jaggernaut, and crushes poor upstart poets, patriots, and philosophers (the beings of an hour) and the successive never-ending generations of fools and knaves, beneath its feet; and mankind bow their willing necks to the yoke, and eagerly consign their children and their children’s children to be torn in pieces by its scythe, or trampled to death by the gay, gaudy, painted, blood-stained wheels of the grim idol of power!’ (vii, 147) 5 As P.M.S. Dawson notes in The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, p. 231 and n. 6 See Hunt, Correspondence, vol. i, p. 124. Shelley would also have read of Hazlitt’s attack on Gifford in The Examiner of 26 September and 3 and 10 October 1819 which he received in Italy from Hunt (see note 3 above).
Notes 169 7 Dawson, Unacknowledged Legislator, pp. 230–9. Laurence Lockridge also suggests a number of parallels, but without entering into the question of influence, in separate chapters on Shelley and Hazlitt in The Ethics of Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, especially p. 335. 8 Dawson, Unacknowledged Legislator, p. 230. 9 Ibid., p. 234. 10 Terence Hoagwood, Skepticism and Ideology: Shelley’s Political Prose and its Philosophical Context from Bacon to Marx, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988, p. 156. 11 All quotations from Shelley’s prose are taken from The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (eds), 10 vols, London and New York: Ernest Benn and Charles Scribner, 1927. References are by volume and page. 12 See Stanley Jones, Hazlitt: A Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, p. 6. 13 Herschel Baker shows this to be the case in his biography, William Hazlitt, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962, p. 140. 14 I am indebted to Tom Paulin for drawing my attention to this passage. 15 Lockridge, Ethics of Romanticism, p. 283. 16 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn revised P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, pp. 358, 359, 384. 17 Ibid., p. 340. 18 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (eds), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976, p. 9. 19 Hume, Treatise, p. 341. 20 Hume, Treatise, p. 352. To Smith, comparably, ‘We expect less sympathy from a common acquaintance than from a friend. … We expect still less sympathy from an assembly of strangers’ (Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 23). 21 P.B. Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, D.H. Reiman and S. B. Powers (eds), New York: Norton, 1977, p. 503. For ease of reference, I am footnoting quotations from the Defence of Poetry with additional page references to the Norton edition. 22 Ibid., pp. 500, 501, 503. 23 David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd edn revised P.H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, p. 298. 24 Here too, Smith is in concurrence with Hume: ‘Sympathy … cannot, in any sense, be regarded as a selfish principle’ (Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 317). 25 Reiman and Powers (eds), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, pp. 502–3. 26 Ibid., pp. 488, 490. 27 Ibid., p. 485. 28 Ibid., p. 497. Shelley’s ‘dull vapours of the little world of self’ has a prototype in Hazlitt’s ‘idea of self’ which ‘habitually clings to the mind of every man … deadening its discriminating powers, and spreading … confused associations’ (i, 3). 29 Prometheus Unbound, Act IV, ll. 483–4 and ll. 573–4 in P.B. Shelley, The Poems of Shelley, K. Everest and G. Matthews (eds), 2 vols published, London and New York: Longman, 1989, 2000, vol. ii, pp. 643, 648. 30 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 504n. 31 Reiman and Powers (eds), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, pp. 487–8. 32 Everest and Matthews (eds), Poems of Shelley, p. 487. In this passage, Shelley is close, not only, as has widely been acknowledged, to Coleridge in chapter fourteen of Biographia Literaria – ‘awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for … the film of familiarity’ – see S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, W.J. Bate and J. Engell (eds), vol. vii of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen series no. 75, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, vol. ii, p. 7 – but also to Hazlitt in the Round Table essay ‘On Imitation’, first published in The Examiner of 18 February 1816: ‘Art shows us
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nature, divested of the medium of our prejudices…. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature’ (iv, 74). Shelley is also of course borrowing from his own earlier prose fragment, ‘On Life’, dated to 1815: ‘The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being’ (Ingpen and Peck, vi, 193). 33 Everest and Matthews (eds), Poems of Shelley, vol. ii, p. 475.
9 ‘Darkening knowledge’: Hazlitt and Bentham on the limits of empiricism 1 For further background on Hazlitt’s tenancy, see A.C. Grayling, The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000, pp. 157–8, 252. 2 For the background to this issue, see Roy Park, Hazlitt and The Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. 3 Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring, 11 vols, Edinburgh: Simkin, Marshall & Co. and London: W. Tait, 1838–43, vol. viii, p. 246. 4 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, London: Harper Collins/ Fontana Press, 1973, p. 26. 5 See W.V. Quine, ‘Five Milestones of Empiricism’, in his Theories and Things, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 67–72. The first ‘milestone’, incidentally, Quine takes to be John Horne Tooke’s shifting of empirical attention ‘from ideas to words’ (p. 67). 6 Laurence S. Lockridge, for example, in The Ethics of Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, claims that Romantic writers (with the exception of Percy Shelley) are ‘clear in their opposition to hedonistic utilitarianism, [and] the fact/value dichotomy’. Lockridge is correct in point of fact, but I will suggest that it is, paradoxically, Bentham’s utilitarianism that ultimately enables him to overcome the very fact/value dichotomy that continues to exercise Hazlitt. 7 As presented by, for example, Kathleen Wheeler, in Romanticism, Pragmatism and Deconstruction, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Similarly, Tilottama Rajan, in The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990, argues that ‘the romantic period initiates an awareness of empirical “realities” as textual phenomena’ (p. 36). 8 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, p. 159. 9 John Horne Tooke, EΠ EA Π TEPOENTA, or the Diversions of Purley, ed. Richard Taylor, 2 vols, London, 1829, vol. ii, p. 18. 10 See Hazlitt’s 1821 Table-Talk essay, ‘On Genius and Common Sense’: ‘all that is meant by feeling or common sense is nothing but the different cases of the association of ideas’ (viii, 35). 11 As Hazlitt notes in ‘The Spirit of Controversy’ (The Atlas, 1830): ‘Truth is not one thing, but has many aspects and many shades of difference; it is neither all black nor all white; sees something wrong on its own side, something right in others’ (xx, 306). 12 Immanuel Kant, introduction [‘B’], Critique of Pure Reason, Paul Guyer and Allen B. Wood (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 138. 13 Jeremy Bentham, Chrestomathia, M.J. Smith and W.H. Burston (eds), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983, p. 179. 14 Jeremy Bentham, preface, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (eds), London: The Athlone Press, 1970, p. 1. 15 These four essays appear to have been intended as parts of a general study of logic and language but, as with much of his later writing, Bentham made little effort to prepare the material for the press. It is a telling reflection on the continuing neglect of this important dimension of his thought that there remains no authoritative modern edition of these works, though C.K. Ogden made an attempt at a synthesis of manuscript sources
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16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30
31 32
33 34 35
36 37 38
in Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1932. Consequently, all references to the above essays are based on John Bowring’s flawed but workable edition of The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham, Introduction, p. 97. As Bentham later put it in the ‘Fragment on Ontology’: ‘In the mind of all, fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity; – in that of poets of amusement – in that of the priest and the lawyer of mischievous immorality’ (Bentham, Works, vol. viii, p. 199). Bentham, Introduction, p. 102. Bentham, Works, vol. viii, p. 196. Jeremy Bentham, Deontology, A Table of the Springs of Action, and Article on Utilitarianism, ed. Amnon Goldworth, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983, p. 98. Bentham, Works, vol. viii, p. 218. Jeremy Bentham, A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government, J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (eds), London: The Athlone Press, 1977, p. 495. Bentham, Works, vol. viii, pp. 256–7. See Tooke, Diversions, vol. i, p. 34: ‘H’ acknowledges that Locke was right at least that ‘the origin of Ideas … [is] the proper starting-post of a Grammarian who is to treat of their signs’. Bentham, Chrestomathia, p. 271. Tooke, Diversions, vol. ii, p. 402. Bentham, Works, vol. viii, p. 321. Ibid., p. 246. W.V. Quine, ‘Epistemology Naturalised’, in his Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, New York: Columbia University Press, 1969, p. 72. This is in marked to contrast to Elie Halévy, who in The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1928), 3rd edn, trans. Mary Morris, London: Faber & Faber, 1972, dismissed the technique as vague and inferior to ‘genetic definition’ (p. 459). Halévy’s reading is in turn criticized by Ogden in Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, p. xxx. James Mulvihill, in ‘The Poetics of Authority: Representation in Hazlitt’s Political Criticism’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 101.4, 2002, makes a similar connection between the two writers with respect to their treatment of ‘politics as representation’ (p. 543). John Barrell, Poetry, Language and Politics, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988, p. 15. Ross Harrison, Bentham, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, suggests that Bentham ‘summarily dismissed’ epistemological questions with a ‘little tincture of utility’ (p. 54). On this matter, however, I incline towards H.L.A. Hart’s position in ‘Bentham’, in Jeremy Bentham: Ten Critical Essays, ed. Bhikhu Parekh, London: Frank Cass, 1974, which maintains that ‘practical ends to be served were conceived by [Bentham] in no small-minded way. It was no less than that of making men conscious of the seeds of deception and confusion buried in the very texture of human thought’ (p. 84). Tom Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style, London: Faber & Faber, 1998, p. 156. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, p. 15. See Angela Esterhammer, ‘Of Promises, Contracts and Constitutions: Thomas Reid and Jeremy Bentham on Language as Social Action’, Romanticism 6.1, 2000: ‘Like Derrida … Bentham recognizes that the ever-present possibility of failure or abuse is part of what constitutes even the successful speech act’ (p. 71). Uttara Natarajan, Hazlitt and the Reach of Sense: Criticism, Morals, and the Metaphysics of Power, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 2. Ibid., p. 6. Wilfred Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 63.
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39 Ibid., p. 7. 40 John Stuart Mill, ‘Coleridge’, in Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, ed. F.R. Leavis, London: Chatto & Windus, 1959, p. 99. 41 Ibid., p. 97. 42 David Collings, ‘Bentham’s Auto-Icon: Utilitarianism and the Evisceration of the Common Body’, Prose Studies 23.3, 2000, p. 99. 43 Bentham, Works, vol. viii, p. 331 (my emphasis). 10 Schelling and Hazlitt on disinterestedness and freedom 1 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände in. Werke, ed. Manfred Schröter, Munich: C.H. Beck, 1958–60, p. 92; hereafter referred to as S3. Subsequent references to Schelling’s essay on Freedom (= S), Hazlitt’s writings, including the Essay on the Principles of Human Action (= Howe), and Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (= K3) and Kritik der Urteilskraft (= K10) in Immanuel Kant, Werke, 6 vols., ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975). 2 Robert Boyle, Some motives and incentives to the love of God: pathetically discours’d of in a letter to a friend (1648), 3rd edn ‘much corrected by the Publisher’, London: Printed for Henry Herringman, 1663; retitled A treatise of Seraphic Love, London, 1700, xiii, p. 66. 3 Obadiah Walker, Some instructions concerning the Art of Oratory: collected for the use of a friend [a] young student, London: Printed by J.G. for R. Royston, 1659, p. 115. 4 George Stanhope, A Paraphrase and Comment upon the Epistles and Gospels, appointed to be used in the Church of England on all Sundays and holy-days throughout the year, 4 vols, London: Printed by W.B. for S. Keble, 1705–9, vol. iii, p. 435. 5 S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, vol. vii of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen series no. 75, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, Ch. xii. 6 Frederick Burwick, ‘Perception and “the heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF”’, in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria: Text and Meaning, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1989, pp. 127–37. 7 Schelling, Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie, in Werke (S1: 58–9). 8 Schelling, ‘Vorläufige Beziehung des Standpuktes der Medicin nach Grundsätzen der Naturphilosophie’, from Jahrbücher der Medicin (S7: 260–88); John Brown, Elementa medicinae, ed. prima italica post ultimam Edimburgensem plurimum emendata atque integrum opus exhibens, cui praefatus est Petrus Moscati … Mediolani, Joseph Galeatius, 1792; see also Werner E. Gerabek, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling und die Medizin der Romantik: Studien zu Schellings Würzburger Periode, Frankfurt and New York: P. Lang, 1995. 9 See Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of men, manners, opinions, rpt of the first edn, London, 1711, 3 vols, Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms, 1978; and also Johann Christian Reil, ‘Über das Gemeingefühl’ (1794), in Kleine Schriften wissenschaftlichen und gemeinnützigen Inhalts, Halle: Curtschen Buchhandlung, 1817, pp. 34–112. 10 First introduced by the Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman (1735–84) in his A Dissertation on Elective Attractions (1775), the concept of chemical election anticipated the subsequent study of atomic weight and valences to explain which substances are capable of entering into combination with each other. The term ‘elective affinity’ is used by James Hutton (1726–97) in A Dissertation upon the Philosophy of Light, Heat and Fire, Edinburgh: Cadell, Junior, Davies, 1794. William Henry (1775–1836) in Elements of Experimental Chemistry (1799) studied how ‘elective affinity’ is altered by pressure, demonstrating that water takes up increased volumes of gas in ratio to the increase in the common pressure of the atmosphere. Jons Jakob Berzelius (1779–1848), experimenting with the voltaic pile and the electrolysis of various solutions, assumed that atoms were
Notes 173
11
12
13
14
15 16
17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
electrically charged and were held together in a molecule by the attraction of opposite charges. E.g. Ernst Platner, Anthropologie für Ärzte und Weltweise, Leipzig: Dyckische Buchhandlung, 1772 and Samuel Thomas Soemmering, Über das Orgaan der Seele, Königsberg: Nicolovius, 1796; see Steffano Poggi, ‘Mind and Brain in Medical Thought during the Romantic Period’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, vol. x Supplement, pp. 41–53; and Michael Hagner, Homo cerebralis. Die Wandel vom Seelenorgan zum Gehirn, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997, pp. 63–87. Franz Joseph Gall, Philosophische-Medicinische Untersuchungen über Natur und Kunst im kranken und gesunde Zustande des Menschen, Vienna: Grässer und Co., 1791; Jakob Fidelis Ackermann, Die Gall’sche Hirn-, Schedel- und Organenenlehre vom Gesichtspunkte der Erfahrung aus beurtheilt und widerlegt, Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1806. Johann Christian Reil, ‘Über den Bau des Gehirns und die Nerven’ (1795), in Kleine Schriften, pp. 113–32; ‘Über die Eigenschaften des Ganglions-System und seine Verhältnis zum Cerebralsystem’, Archiv für die Physiologie, vol. vii (1807), pp. 189–254; ‘Fragmente über die Bildung des kleinen Gehirns im Menschen’, Archiv für die Physiologie, vol. viii (1807, 1808), pp. 1–58; 273–304; 385–426. Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, Über die Verhältniße der organische Kräfye unter einander in der Reihe der verschiedene Organisationen, die Gesetze und Folgen dieser Verhältniße (1795), and Karl Friedrich Burdach, Beyträge zur näheren Kenntniss des Gehirns in Hinsicht auf Physiologie, Medicin und Chirurgie, 2 vols, Leipzig: Breitkopf und Haertel, 1806. See also Gerabek, Schelling, pp. 18–32. Schelling, Von der Weltseele, eine Hypothese der höheren Physik (1798), in Werke (S1: 627–8). Schelling, Von der Weltseele, in Werke (S1: 600–5). On evolution, Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia or The Laws of Organic Life. In three parts, London: Joseph Johnson, 1794–6, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Metamorphose der Pflanzen (1790) in Goethes Werke, ed. Erich Trunz et al., 14 vols, Hamburg: Wegner, 1965–7. Schelling, Von der Weltseele, in Werke (S1: 630–2). On sensibility/irritability and polarity, Schelling cites John Brown, Elementa medicinae (1792); Abrecht von Haller, Elementa physiologiae corporis humani, (1763); vol. v, Christoph Heinrich Pfaff, Über thierische Electricität und Reizbarkeit (1795); Isaac Newton, Opticks: or, A treatise of the reflections, refractions, inflexions and colours of light. Also two treatises of the species and magnitude of curvilinear figures, London: Printed for S. Smith, and B. Walford, 1704. Optic. III, quaest. 26; and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Beiträge zur Optik (1791–2), in Werke, vols 13–14. Schelling, Von der Weltseele, in Werke (S1: 632). David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1749), ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, pp. 11–13, 92, 283–6, 305–16; on causation, pp. 74–88. Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur, in Werke (S1: 130–1). Prolegomena to Coleridge, Opus Maximum, ed. Thomas McFarland, pp. ccxxviii–cxxxi; see also Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. i, Ch. xii, pp. 264–89. Frederick Burwick, ‘Art for Art’s Sake’, in Mimesis and its Romantic Reflections, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001, pp. 17–44; Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, in Werke (S5: 353–6, 488–736). On moral sickness, Schelling cites Franz Baader, ‘Über die Behauptung, daß kein übler Gebrauch der Vernunft sein kann’, in Morgenblatt, Nr. 197, 1807, und ‘Über Starres und Fließendes’, in Jahrbüchern der Medizin als Wissenschaft, vol. 3, no. 2, Tübingen: Cotta, 1806. Schelling compared the empty sententiousness of the new philosophy to the posturing of ‘French theatre heroes’ (S3: 431), and he scorned French aesthetics for having climbed to the very pinnacle of ‘the mechanical mode of the thought’ (S3: 444). The folk rhyme, ‘Die Gedanken sind frei’ was circulated as a broadside in Bavaria and Switzerland between 1780 and 1800; text and melody were printed in Lieder der Brienzer Mädchen (Songs of the Bernese Maidens, Bern, c. 1815). The song was prohibited in Germany during the revolutionary years of 1848–9 and again under the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler.
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11 ‘A nature towards one another’: Hazlitt and the inherent disinterestedness of moral agency 1 J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, London: Penguin, 1977 passim for a statement and defence of the doctrine of enlightened self-interest. 2 See J. Butler, Butler’s Fifteen Sermons preached at the Rolls Chapel and a Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue, ed. T.A. Roberts, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1970 passim; Butler was an influence on Hazlitt in this respect. 3 P.F. Strawson, Individuals: an essay in descriptive metaphysics, London: Methuen, 1959, Ch. 3 passim. 4 Ibid.; see also A.C. Grayling, The Refutation of Scepticism, London: Duckworth, 1985, p. 96.
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Index
abstraction 4, 23, 78, 98, 107, 108, 126–9, 131–6 Ackermann, Jakob 144 Adorno, Theodor 74 Albrecht, W.P. 5–6 Alfoxden 83–8, 94, 96 America 3 Anglicanism 110 Annual Review 3 Anti-Jacobin 3 Aristotelianism 37, 48, 122, 153 Arnold, Matthew 56 associationism 11, 27, 102, 128, 140–7 The Athenaeum 75 Bacon, Francis 33, 68, 120 Baker, Herschel xvi Ballantyne Press 40 Baptists xvi Barrell, John 132 Barresi, John 7–8, 98 Basedow, Johann Bernhard 149 Bate, Jonathan 40 Bate, Walter Jackson 5 Baxter, Andrew 52 Benda, Julien 75 benevolence 6, 7, 23, 113, 115, 119, 148, 149, see also disinterestedness Benjamin, Walter 75, 78 Bentham, Jeremy 12, 36, 68, 70, 71, 114, 125–36; Mill on 135–6; paraphrastic method 126–7, 132; Chrestomathia 129, 134; ‘Essay on Language’ 130, 132, 136; ‘Essay on Logic’ 126, 130–2; ‘A Fragment on Government’ 131; ‘A Fragment on Ontology’ 130; ‘Fragments on Universal Grammar’ 130; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 129, 130; ‘Of Motives’
131; A Table of the Springs of Action 130 Berkeley, George 30, 89, 90, 92, 94, 128 Blake, William 77 Boydell Shakespeare Gallery 36 Boyle, Robert 138 brain 9, 140–5 Bristol 88, 151 British 68, 72 Bromwich, David xiii, 7, 9, 45, 98 Brook, Peter 55 Brown, John 140, 145 Bullitt, John 5 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 4 Burdach, Karl Friedrich 144 Burke, Edmund 24, 28, 68, 69, 72, 74, 79, 111 Burwick, Frederick 12, 13 Butler, Joseph 6, 17, 98 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Lord Byron 69, 74, 78; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto IV 77 Cadell, Thomas xvi Carlyle, Thomas xiv, 34, 54 causation 37, 131, 146–9 character 9, 19, 31, 32, 35–40, 49, 50, 98, 151, 153, 154 Chartists 74 Chaucer, Geoffrey 49 Christ 147 Christianity 94, 97 Cicero 113 Clarke, Charles Cowden 112 Coburn, Kathleen 6 ‘Cockney’ school 76 Coleridge, Berkeley 83 Coleridge, George 85, 90 Coleridge, Hartley 83
184
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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor xiv, xvii, 11, 30, 36, 50–4, 71, 85–97, 139, 147; Hazlitt on xiii, 106–7; Mill on 135–6; his estimate of Hazlitt as philosopher 93, 98, 151; on nature 51; ‘The Eolian Harp’ 89; Aids to Reflection 51; ‘The Rime of The Ancyent Marinere’ 83; Biographia Literaria 52, 139; ‘The Brook’ 85; Lay Sermons 3; Lyrical Ballads 83; ‘Religious Musings’ 85, 92; ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ 89, 94 Collings, David 136 ‘Copernican Revolution’ (Kant’s) 139, 149 Corrie, John xiii Cottle, Joseph 83, 88 Courier 96 Cowper, William 107, 108 D’Alembert, Jean-le-Rond 131 Dante Alighieri 78 Dart, Gregory 71 Darwin, Charles 7 Davenport, Benjamin xvi Davis, Philip 10 Dawson, P.M.S. 113, 115, 119 Deane, Seamus 76 De Quincey, Thomas 1, 12, 98, 104, 107; Suspiria de Profundis 105, 106; see also ‘dislimn’ Derrida, Jacques 9 Descartes, René 144 Dickens, Charles xiv Diogenes 113 disinterestedness xiv, 2, 6–9, 13, 22, 56, 57, 90, 111, 114, 115, 118, 120, 137–50, 151–6, 158, 159; see also benevolence ‘dislimn’ 100, 106, 107 Dissent 73; see also Unitarianism Dyer, George xv Eclectic Review 3 education 27–9 ego(t)ism 13, 34, 43, 75, 87, 127, 145, 148, 150, 151, 153, 154 Elgin Marbles 37 Eliot, George xiv empiricism 10, 19, 32, 68–72, 74, 79, 121, 125–8, 132, 135, 136, 145 Encyclopaedia Britannica 98 Encyclopaedists (French) 131, 138 England xv, 1, 3, 28, 29, English character 9, 73, 75, 100, 105 English culture 3, 37, 84
English language 77–80, 99 English Revolution 75 Enlightenment 71, 73 epistemology 2, 33–5, 40, 129, 130, 134 Esterhammer, Angela 134 Esthwaite, Lake 88 Estlin, John Prior 93 Everest, Kelvin 121 The Examiner 60, 75, 87, 112, 121 Fenwick, Isabella 88 Fichte, Johann Gottleib 148 Fielding, Henry 64, 66 Finney, C.L. 5 freedom (liberty) 9, 27, 28, 52, 91, 104, 111, 114, 137, 145–50 French character 9, 12, 98–101, 105, 106, 108, French culture 73, 137, 138 French Revolution 70, 74, 75, 97, 150 Frend, William xv Freudianism 75 Gaskell, Elizabeth xiv Geertz, Clifford 126 Germany xv, 54, 84, 86, 96, 134, 137 Gifford, William 2, 76, 85, 110, 112, 113, 121, 155 Gilmartin, Kevin 71 Glasgow, University of 85 God 34, 71, 73, 87, 89, 92–4, 97, 147, 148 Godwin, William xv–xvii, 21, 35, 36, 49, 90–3, 112–14 Goethe, J.W. von 51, 145 Goldsmith, Oliver, The Vicar of Wakefield 63 Goslar 94 grammar 78, 114, 130, 134, 135 Grasmere 1, 84, 101 Grayling, A.C. 13 Guardian appeal xiv, 1 gusto xiv, 70, 76, 153 Hackney New College xiii, xv, 85, 93 Haller, Albrecht 145 Hamilton, Paul 11, 12 Hampstead 112 Hardy, Thomas 102 Hartley, David 13, 33, 90, 92, 100, 102, 109 Hassler, Donald 7 Hazlitt, John (brother to the essayist) xv, xvii
Index 185 Hazlitt, Revd. William (father to the essayist) xvi, xvii, 83 Hazlitt, William: life and career: and Bentham 125; and Coleridge xiii, 83–97, 151; and Joseph Johnson xv–xviii; and Wordsworth 21, 83–97, 151; his grave xiv, 1, see also Guardian appeal; his place in philosophy 3–13, 98, 126, 155, 157; his religion 92, 111 Hazlitt, William: Essay on the Principles of Human Action: composition of 83–5; empiricism of 32; footnote on the French 98–100, 105; imagination in 31, 52, 55, 56; originality of 4–9, 17, 84, 98; publication of xv–xviii; reception of 3–13, 112–13; sexuality in 57–60; thesis of 17–27, 30–3, 42, 56, 113, 156–8 Hazlitt, William: opinions: consistency of 13; compared with Bentham’s 12, 129–36; compared with Burke’s 69–70, 72; compared with Coleridge’s 92–7, 136; compared with Schelling’s 145–6; compared with Shelley’s 70, 71, 73, 115–16, 118; compared with Wordsworth’s 11–12, 71; on abstraction 98–101, 127–9; on Bentham 36, 125–8, 132; on Byron 69; on Coleridge 36, 107; on the Essay 2; on feeling 98–9, 108; on Godwin 35, 36; on the French 98–101, 105, 107; on Irving 34–6; on Kean 39–40, 61–2, 72; on language 77–9, 99, 105, 125, 132–6; on Malthus 10, 60–2; on Milton 41; on poetry 43, 44, 46, 50, 53, 76–7, 122; on philosophy 68; on reading 64; on Reynolds 38; on Scott 68; on sexuality 57–62; on Shakespeare 10, 18, 38, 44–54, 75, 99–100, 106–7; on Shelley 11, 73–4; on Titian 36–8; on Tooke 72–3, 127–8, 134; on women 65–7; on Wordsworth 11, 69, 74–7, 96, 97 Hazlitt, William: works of: abridgement of Abraham Tucker’s The Light of Nature Pursued xvii, 128–9; ‘Aphorisms on Man’ 7, 152, 154–5, 158; Characters of Shakespear’s Plays xiv, 2, 18, 38, 43–55, 76, 106, 107; ‘Characteristics’ 153, 158; ‘Common Places’ 62, 152; ‘Common Sense’ 128; Conversations of Northcote 79; ‘Definition of Wit’ 78; The Eloquence of the British Senate xiv, xvi, 111; Fragments of Lectures on Philosophy 49, 72; ‘Free Thoughts on
Public Affairs’ 9, 27; A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue 78, 114, 134, 135; ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper’ 112; Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth 39; Lectures on the English Comic Writers 33; Lectures on English Philosophy 134, 150; Lectures on the English Poets 41, 87, 96, 118, 122; ‘Letter to my Son’ 63; Letter to William Gifford, Esq. 2, 76, 85, 110, 112, 113, 121, 155; Liber Amoris 10, 56, 62, 63, 65; ‘Mind and Matter’ 60; Miscellaneous Writings 118; ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ xiii, xiv, 11, 30, 83–5, 87, 92, 96, 97; ‘On Abstract Ideas’ 127; ‘On Classical Education’ 27; ‘On Egotism,’ 26, 151, 153; ‘On Envy’ 1, 151; ‘On Familiar Style’ 21; ‘On Great and Little Things’ 2, 66; ‘On Liberty and Necessity’ 52, 150; ‘On Living to One’s-Self’ 46; ‘On Patriotism’ 27, 34; ‘On People of Sense’ 132; ‘On Personal Character’ 31, 151; ‘On Poetry in General’ 43, 44, 46, 50, 53, 122; ‘On Posthumous Fame’ 121; ‘On Reading Old Books’ 41; ‘On SelfLove’ 150; ‘On the Causes of Popular Opinion’ 2, 30; ‘On the Ideal’ 37; ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’ 151; ‘On the Prose Style of Poets’ 78, 101, 110; ‘Outlines of Morals’ 152; The Plain Speaker 1, 13, 31, 36, 70, 74, 78, 118, 132, 151, 154, 158; Prospectus of a History of English Philosophy 68, 127; A Reply to Malthus’s Essay on Population 10, 57, 59, 71; The Round Table 27, 34, 97, 121; ‘Schlegel on the Drama’ 45; ‘Self-Love and Benevolence’ 44, 152, 154, 158; Select British Poets xviii; ‘The Spirit of Controversy’ 75; The Spirit of the Age xiv, 2, 34, 87, 90, 96, 106, 107, 125, 129, 132; TableTalk 2, 112; A View of the English Stage 61; ‘Whether Genius is Conscious of its Powers’ 41 Hazlitt, William Carew xv, xvii, xviii, 63–6 Heaney, Seamus xiv Hegel, G.W.F. 71 Heidegger, Martin 9 Helvétius 33, 101, 109, 138, 145, 150 Hoagwood, Terence 113, 116, 122 Hobbes, Thomas 20, 21, 44, 103, 104
186
Index
Homer, The Iliad 46 Horne, Richard Henry 3, 4, 7 Horne Tooke, John xv, 12, 72, 73, 104, 128, 131, 134, 135 Howe, Percival Presland xviii Hughes, Ted xiv Hume, David 17, 26, 30, 32, 69, 92, 113, 116–20, 122, 130, 146, 147, 149 Hunt, James Henry Leigh 76, 112–14 see also Examiner Hunter, Rowland xviii Hutcheson, Francis 111, 145 Iago 40, 61, 62, 66 idea 4, 19, 23, 25, 30, 32–40, 46, 49, 103, 104, 109, 121, 127, 128, 130, 131, 141–4, 158 of the self 30, 54, 58; see also associationism, idealism idealism 9, 17, 54, 108, 120, 121, 128, 134–6 identity 8, 9, 21, 25–6, 30–42, 57, 136, 138–42, 149, 154, 156, 157 imagination 61, 71, 98, 144, 156; and future 20, 21, 25, 27, 33, 117, and human nature 2, 5, 8–13, 17–28, 52, 127, 146, 157; contrasted with reality 9, 64, 109, 139, 143, 149; Hobbes on 103; Hume on 116–18; and morality 56, 150; in painting 37; in literature 10, 43, 45, 46, 55; Shelley on 120, 127 Inchbald, Elizabeth, Nature and Art 63 Ingolstadt 137 involution 104, 106, 109 Irving, Edward 34–6 Italy 84, 112
Kielmeyer, Carl Friedrich 144 King’s Bench Prison xv Kinnaird, John 6, 34, 75 Lake District xvi, 93 Lamb, Charles 1, 4, 84, 97 Lamb, Mary 1 La Rochefoucauld, Francois VI de 20 Levellers 75 Linton 151 Locke, John 20, 24, 35, 104, 128–30 Lockridge, Laurence 115 London xvii, 1, 83 London Magazine 3, 107 Long Acre xvii Longinus 45, 54 Lonsdale, Lord 96 Losh, James 84 Lukacs, Georg 78
Jacobean tragedy 74 Jacobinism 11, 68, 70, 71, 76, 77 Jeffrey, Francis 85 Jena 78, 86 Johnson, Joseph xv–xvii Jones, Stanley xiii, xv Judas Iscariot 147
McFarland, Thomas 147 Mackenzie, Henry 148; Man of Feeling 63, 148 Mackie, J.L. 155 Mackintosh, Sir James 98 Malthus, Thomas xv, 10, 57–61, 67, 71, 107 Mandeville, Bernard 17, 155 Martin, Raymond 7–8, 98 Marxism 75 memory 26, 41, 46, 103, 141, 143–6, 148, 159 Mill, John Stuart 36, 71, 135, 136 Milnes, Tim 9, 12 Milton, John 41, 47, 50, 70, 71, 77, 109, 125, 153; allusion to 3; Paradise Lost 125 Montaigne, Michel de 33 Monthly Repository 4 Monthly Review 3 Mulvihill, James 9–10, 112 Munich 137 Myers, F.W.H. 54
Kames, Lord (Henry Home) 51 Kant, Immanuel 8, 12, 17, 128, 129, 137, 139, 144–9; see also ‘Copernican Revolution’ Kean, Edmund 39–40, 61–2, 72, 73 Keats, John xiii, 5, 11, 74, 76, 98, 112, 121; Lamia 77; ‘Ode on a Grecian urn’ 49; see also negative capability Keswick 1, 101 Keynes, Geoffrey xv, xvii
Nabholtz, John R. xviii Napoleon 63, 70, 150; Napoleonic wars 28 Natarajan, Uttara 8, 12, 70, 71, 76, 95, 98, 134 National Portrait Gallery xiii nature 13, 37, 38, 45, 48, 50–2, 89, 92, 94, 144 necessity 11, 13, 26, 60, 90, 91, 147–9 negative capability 5, 77, 98 Nether Stowey 11, 83–7, 90, 94, 96
Index 187 New Monthly Magazine 34, 44 New Testament 138 Newton, Isaac 50, 145 Northcote, James, R.A. 79 Noxon, James 5 Ollier, Charles and James xviii Ong, Walter 40 Opie, John 37 Ostell, Thomas xvi Paine, Thomas xv, 92 painting 30, 33, 36, 37, 133 Paley, William 3 Park, Roy 6, 70 Paulin, Tom 9, 11, 12, 69, 73, 78, 132; The Day-Star of Liberty 104 Peacock, Thomas Love 74, 78 Petrarch 78 Pfaff, Johann Friedrich 145 Philanthropism 148 Pitt, William (the younger) 28 Platonism 17 poetry: emotion in 43, 53; imagination in 45, 50, 118, 120; as legislation 113–14; and liberty 74, 76–7; and other arts 30, 78, 133; and prose 77, 78, 101, 110, 133 Poole, Thomas 97 Priestley, Joseph xv, 48, 90 Price, John V. xviii Proust, Marcel 75 Puritanism 70 Pygmalion 62, 65 Quakers xvi Quantock Hills 90 Quarterly Review 4, 112 Quine, W.V. 126, 127, 132, 135 Racine, Jean 43, 100 Regency 38 Reil, Johann Christian 144 Rembrandt 37 Republicanism 76, 112 Richardson, Samuel 64, 66 Robespierre 70 Robinson, Anthony xv, xvi Robinson, Henry Crabb xv, xvi, 93 Romanticism 5, 8–10, 18, 38, 41, 54, 69, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80, 121, 122, 125, 127, 132, 135, 136 Rosenbaum, Barbara xviii Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 24, 58, 70, 100
Ruskin, John xiv Rydal Mount 84 Ryle, Gilbert 126 Sade, Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de 150 Satan 77 Saussure, Ferdinand de 79 Schelling, F.W.J. 12, 13, 137–49; on freedom and causality 145–9; on identity 139–40; on nature 144–5 Schlegel, A.W. 45 Schneider, Elisabeth 4, 5 Schoolmen 155 Scots 34, 35 Scott, Walter 35, 43, 68 ‘selfish hypothesis’ 22, 24, 119 self-interest 2, 7. 20, 28, 31–33, 47, 61, 113, 114, 152–6; see also, ego(t)ism, self-love self-love 3, 10, 17–29, 44, 57, 58, 61, 63, 67, 69, 113, 115–19, 120; see also ego(t)ism, self-interest Sellars, Wilfred 134 September Massacres 109 sexuality 10, 57–62, 65, 66 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of 145 Shakespeare, William 10, 36, 43–55, 73, 100, 106, 121, 152, 153; All’s Well that Ends Well 154; Antony and Cleopatra 48, 52, 99–100, 106, 107, see also ‘dislimn’; Coriolanus 18, 76; Hamlet 44, 75; Julius Caesar 44; King Lear 10, 43–5, 53–4, see also egotism; Macbeth 44, 49–50; Measure for Measure 49, 79, 110; Merchant of Venice 38, 39, see also Shylock; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 47; Othello 39, 49, 61–2, 66, see also Iago; Romeo and Juliet 52–3; Troilus and Cressida 47; Twelfth Night 48 Shelley, Mary 112, 113 Shelley, Percy Bysshe xiii, 11, 12, 70, 71, 73, 74, 77, 94, 132; his debt to Hazlitt 18, 112–22; A Defence of Poetry 113, 118, 119, 121, 122; ‘On a Future State’ 23; A Philosophical View of Reform 112, 114, 119; Prometheus Unbound 121; Queen Mab 74; ‘Speculations on Morals’ 12, 113, 115, 116, 118, 119, 122; ‘Triumph of Life’ 74, 112 Shylock 39 Siddons, Fanny 39
188
Index
Smith, Adam 12, 17, 85, 116 Somerset 84, 151 Sorbonne University 138 Southey, Robert 89, 90 Spinoza, Baruch 148 Stanhope, George 138 Stevenson, Robert Louis xiv Strawson, Peter 13, 157, 158 Swift, Jonathan 74 Talfourd, Thomas Noon 3 Thackeray, William Makepeace xiv theatre 39, 40, 43–6, 55, 61, 62, 72, 73 Thelwall, John 93 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) 36–8, 153 Tooke, John Horne see Horne Tooke Tories 75, 96 trahison des clercs 76 Trawick, Leonard 5 truth 4, 21, 35, 125, 131, 133, 153, 156 Tucker, Abraham xvii, 128 Unitarianism xiii, xv, xvi, 85, 91, 92, 94 see also Dissent utilitarianism 9–10, 12, 17, 56, 58, 60, 61, 127, 129, 130, 131, 133, 136, 155 Victorians xiv, 54 Walker, Obadiah 138 Waller and Glover xviii Wedgwood, Thomas 83
Weimar 86 Wem 84, 85, 92 Westmoreland 1 Whale, John 10 White, Deborah Elise 8, 9 Wicksteed, John 84 Willis, Thomas 144 Wisbech xvii, 93 Wollstonecraft, Mary xv women 4, 64–7 Wordsworth, Dorothy 87 Wordsworth, William xiii, 11, 12, 70, 71, 73–7, 85–97, 105, 115, 151; his estimate of Hazlitt as philosopher 84, 96; The Borderers 21; The Excursion 25, 85, 87, 96; ‘Expostulation and Reply’ 88, 95; Fenwick Notes 88; ‘Immortality Ode’ 108; Lyrical Ballads 25, 84, 88, 89; ‘Not Useless do I Deem’ 86, 90, 91, 94; ‘Nutting’ 95; ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’ 90; ‘The Pedlar’ 91, 93, 94, 96; Peter Bell 84, 87; The Prelude 103, 111; ‘The Recluse’ 11, 84–7, 89–91, 93–7; ‘The Ruined Cottage’ 96; ‘The Tables Turned’ 86–8, 95, 108; ‘Tintern Abbey’ 18, 91, 94, 105; ‘The Two-Part Prelude’ 86, 87, 101–3, 108–11 Wordsworth Museum, Dove Cottage, Grasmere xiii–xiv Wordsworth Circle 7 Wu, Duncan xviii, 11, 101
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