Dear Unknown Friends:

The lecture Hazlitt Tells of Criticism was given by Eli Siegel in August 1970, and we have been serializing this moving, remarkable, definitive work.

It is about literary criticism, certainly: after all, it’s about William Hazlitt (1778-1830), the English critic and essayist whose importance Mr. Siegel is showing. But as I’ve said in these prefatory comments, the lecture is also about everyone. That’s because we’re all critics, of a sort, all the time: whether we’re conscious of doing so or not, we’re always evaluating things, people, ourselves. The purpose of our very lives, Aesthetic Realism shows, is to value rightly: to like the world on an honest basis, through knowing it.

Further, there’s no more hurtful mistake than the one people so often make about criticism, about valuing. The mistake is: that one’s judgment of something or someone arises not from the desire to know and keep knowing—but arises instead from whether this thing or person or idea seems to flatter and aggrandize oneself in some way, makes oneself feel comfortable and superior. There is the unspoken, ugly, so frequent criterion: what makes me important is good; what questions my superiority is bad.

This false critical basis is frequent in the field of love. It’s in the following state of mind: “When I’m with him/her I feel I’m the most important person in the universe—that we outclass everyone, and in each other’s arms we can make the rest of the world disappear!” Then, some while later, these two people will resent each other, may even quarrel intensely. And that’s because their basis for valuing and being valued was contempt for the world and for truth—not the fervent respect for these that love should be.

Here Too

As November approaches, it can be said that elections are like love: they’re a field for criticism, for valuing. And for each voter, as for each lover, the valuing will be based either on the desire to know or on contempt—the desire to look down on other people and the world. Contempt, Mr. Siegel showed, is the big weakener of every person’s mind.

Misvaluing Is about Literature and Life

At the start of Hazlitt Tells of Criticism, Mr. Siegel explained the title: he said Hazlitt’s “life and all his writings taken together show what criticism is.” In the course of the lecture Mr. Siegel comments on the anger Hazlitt met regarding his work: there was a huge inability or unwillingness in persons with so-called authority to see Hazlitt’s value. This critical injustice went on both during his life and after.

Early in the talk Mr. Siegel spoke praisingly about an 1887 article by George Saintsbury, which he also refers to in the section published here. Saintsbury went far in countering the injustice and showing Hazlitt’s might. Yet an animosity toward Hazlitt continued. (T.S. Eliot wrote, snidely, insultingly, and truly stupidly, that Hazlitt “had perhaps the most uninteresting mind of all our distinguished critics.”*)

And Mr. Siegel speaks, in 1970, of a certain distaste for Hazlitt had by university English department educators. They were uncomfortable about him and mainly dealt with him as someone not mattering much. Meanwhile, Mr. Siegel says, “the world at different times sees writing differently”—and in the decades since this lecture there has been increasingly a praise of Hazlitt. He’s now called, by many, a “great” critic. But it is Eli Siegel who has explained why Hazlitt is great—the grand, factual, deep reason why.

Along with the increased esteem, there is still, I’ve seen, a discomfort about Hazlitt in various academic critics. One reason for it, I think, is that Hazlitt did not “specialize.” He was interested, exuberantly and richly, in ever so many things and people: whether Titian, prize-fighting, jugglers, tennis, economic justice, his contemporaries, acting, and of course English literature—and more, and more. Well, there has been a tremendous specializing in academic literary studies: that is, you choose a certain aspect (say early 18th-century English literature) and pretty much stick to that, try to make it your own, and find subjects within it that others haven’t dealt with much.

Eli Siegel was passionately against specialization, in this so-frequent, narrow sense. Certainly there can be a particular field one cares for very much. But he saw and taught that the human mind was made to be affected by the world in its fullness. That is the purpose of education and (as I said) the purpose of our lives: to like the world through knowing it. If we are interested in a particular aspect of the world—hooray! But we won’t be fair to that aspect unless we want to know and see as justly as we can its relation to other things—including things that seem distant from our “field of expertise.” Mr. Siegel said a source of the discomfort various persons felt about Hazlitt was that he seemed to “tramp around too much.” I think that means they were angry because he didn’t stay put—he kept going into territory that surprised. His life and interests were a criticism of the desire in a person to make the world and thought smaller than they are as a means for personal achievement.

William Hazlitt and Eli Siegel

Mr. Siegel was not Hazlitt; they are certainly different. For one thing, Eli Siegel is the critic who explained at last what beauty itself is, what art of every time and place has: “All beauty,” he showed, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” But Mr. Siegel too made for anger because his knowledge was so vastly diverse (even more inclusive than Hazlitt’s). And Mr. Siegel’s wide knowledge had so much feeling in it—and so much exactitude in every instance. Whatever the subject he spoke on, persons hearing him for the first time would think, Oh, this must be his field of expertise.

He made for anger in narrow people, because persons who heard him speak at any length, or who read his writing, knew they had something big to learn from him and from the philosophy he founded. Moreover, people were angry seeing that they needed to learn from him not only about a particular subject but about the world and themselves. I am infinitely sorry to say: I once had that ugly anger. But now, about Mr. Siegel and his knowledge, I’m ever so glad to say the following—which is in keeping with the basis of authentic criticism: If we meet what is true and beautiful, we should rejoice, revel in it, and gratefully learn—because the purpose of our very lives is being met.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Hazlitt and Value

By Eli Siegel

In 1887 there had been the important essay of Saintsbury about Hazlitt. I think that it encouraged the work I’ll now read from: William Hazlitt, Essayist and Critic: Selections from His Writings, with a Memoir, Biographical and Critical, by Alexander Ireland.

As I said, Hazlitt, like other writers, has a history in terms of how he’s been seen. There are goings forward, there’s spinning around, there’s going back. The world at different times sees writing differently. So Hazlitt has undergone the ups and downs and arounds of thought, and also non-thought, or inadequate thought.

For the beginning of his book Ireland writes a long essay on Hazlitt, and in it are things that should be known. He quotes Thomas Talfourd, one of the important dramatists of the early Victorian time. Ireland says:

The highest eulogium that could be bestowed upon [Hazlitt] is contained in one brief sentence of his friend Talfourd’s:—“He had as passionate a desire for truth, as others have for wealth, or power, or fame.”

The Just Seeing of People

Ireland quotes Hazlitt on the subject of what people deserve. Hazlitt didn’t see all that went on in England. Coleridge did not, and neither did Shelley, though Shelley was as bold as anybody. What was going on in England in terms of industry? Hazlitt knew there was something wrong. The knowledge about that would increase during the century. The seeing of people in terms of profit is questioned in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children.” It’s questioned by William Morris, and by Thomas Hood.

Hazlitt did have a feeling that the human beings of England were not seen right. He had it as intensely as anybody. He felt that the well-to-do of England would just as soon see most of the English people as slaves working for them. Hazlitt has many statements against tyranny and for, in the deepest sense, freedom. He felt the idea of freedom without money is simply a philosophic jest—that to be for “freedom” without concern about how much money a person has is fakery. It’s hooey and coldness.

And Hazlitt felt that he was surrounded by persons who were weak about the subject. He was disgusted with Wordsworth there. And he felt that Coleridge went away from the problem of the people of England into the higher episcopacy and the study of the Logos, and that Southey had fallen for the Tory lures. He felt that all of the persons who were talking for freedom in England, given the right temptation would talk a little less. He was very hurt by that. I’m not saying he was accurate. —Ireland quotes Hazlitt as saying:

The question with me is, whether I and all mankind are born slaves or free. That is the one thing necessary to know and to make good….Secure this point, and all is safe; lose this, and all is lost.

Hazlitt suffered from the Tory attacks on him. For example, it seems his Characters of Shakespear’s Plays was selling pretty well, and then a furious article on it appeared in the Tory Quarterly Review and the sale dropped off terrifically.

There Was This

There’s an account of Hazlitt’s being talked to in Switzerland, after he’d gone through a lot. Ireland writes:

We get a glimpse of Hazlitt…in a forgotten article in an early volume of Fraser’s Magazine (March 1839). It was written by Captain Medwin, the friend and biographer of Shelley….[Medwin says Hazlitt’s] countenance bore…a habitual expression of melancholy….A conversation ensued,…about Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, and other literary topics. At its conclusion [Hazlitt] entered into a long history of his own literary wrongs, his neglect by the public, and his bitter persecution by the reviewers. The chord, thus touched, vibrated in every nerve.

How Hazlitt felt is to be seen in some of the lines of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, very much “the spurns / That patient merit of th’unworthy takes.” One can see this in the life of Hazlitt. Leigh Hunt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, too, endured things. One of the last essays of Hazlitt is called “On the Want of Money,” which does give a picture of what that may mean.

There was a feeling that Hazlitt was, well, too ill-tempered. In that way too he is like Hamlet, who could be seen as wandering moodily about the Castle of Elsinore, frightening the ravens.

He was a critic of people. In The Round Table: A Collection of Essays, he deals with people whose good nature is fake. He wrote about religion too, and a famous sentence of his is this:

Religious people often pray very heartily for the forgiveness of a “multitude of trespasses and sins,” as a mark of humility, but we never knew them to admit any one fault in particular, or acknowledge themselves in the wrong in any instance whatever.

Ireland quotes from an essay on Hazlitt by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, which has a great deal of feeling in it:

Said Bulwer,…“I confess that few deaths of the great writers of my time ever affected me more painfully than his. For of most of those who, with no inferior genius, have gone before him, it may be said that in their lives they tasted the sweets of their immortality, they had their consolations of glory….But Hazlitt went down to the dust without having won the crown for which he so bravely struggled; his reputation, great amongst limited circles, was still questionable to the world.”

The Grandeur of Appreciating

The thing we can see in all the dealing with Hazlitt is the feeling that when he appreciated something it was profound, it was religious. Never did he see himself as living more than when he could honestly like something. That is shown by Ireland in the following sentences:

His appreciation of literature and art was more earnest, suggestive, and discriminating than that of any critic of his time or before him; while his style was calculated to rivet attention by its remarkable clearness, fluency, and vigour, its warmth and richness of colouring.

Ireland was emboldened to say this by the essay of Saintsbury published a little earlier. —Another statement of Ireland:

He makes life interesting by hinting to us its latent significance, and he reveals the mysterious charm of character by analysing its elements and probing its inmost depth.

The present-day criticism of Hazlitt is that criticism cannot be just gusto and intensity and appreciation and the using an apt quotation in the praise of some writer. We have still the remnants of certain schools of criticism—which show that when you criticize a work, if you’re not duller than the work itself you don’t really know what you’re talking about. But can there be gusto and intensity with something of depth?

It’s also said that Hazlitt’s value as a philosopher is not much. I deny that. There are statements of Hazlitt in a philosophic field that are definitely good, and matter.

Hazlitt felt that the deeper we go into reality, the more charming it is. This is something we have to feel—otherwise we might as well be superficial. And he, in judging another person, tried to relate good things and bad. That’s why he has two opinions of Coleridge. In his late essay on him, in The Spirit of the Age, you find that Coleridge saddened Hazlitt; still, the best praise of Coleridge, of the time, is in that essay.

Ireland says that Charles Lamb is like this too: he could be critical of Hazlitt but related what he saw as lacking to the good he saw. Ireland says this about Lamb’s writing on Hazlitt:

In canvassing [Hazlitt’s] faults of character, [Lamb] always bore in mind, and called to mind in others, the rare and admirable qualities by which they were accompanied.

This gets to one of the mysteries: how are weakness and strength together in a person?—or badness and goodness, if you want to call it that. How is something that makes for sorrow along with something that makes for strength and gladness? That is a critical question. It’s a large critical question about man: how man is not all one, ethically.

Then Ireland quotes the famous evaluation of Hazlitt in a writing by Lamb, part of a letter Lamb addressed to Robert Southey. Southey felt that Hazlitt was hardly to be commended, and he said derogatory things about Hazlitt. But Lamb, in this letter to Southey published in the London Magazine of 1823, shows Southey has a “religious” point of view (“religious” in quotes) that makes him unfair to people, including to Leigh Hunt and to Hazlitt. This is from the famous passage about Hazlitt, called in the letter W.H. It has a rhythm that is lovely. It’s a fine thing in prose, as such. Ireland comments before he quotes it:

Lamb’s words were these, and they will always stand as a noble record of his heart and intellect:—“I stood well with him [W.H.] for fifteen years (the proudest of my life), and have ever spoke my full mind of him to some to whom his panegyric must naturally be least tasteful. I never in thought swerved from him;…I never slackened in my admiration for him….I wish he would not quarrel with the world at the rate he does….But, protesting against much that he has written, and some things which he chooses to do; judging him by his conversations, which I enjoyed so long and relished so deeply, or by his books, in those places where no clouding passion intervenes—I should belie my own conscience if I said less than that I think W.H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. So far from being ashamed of that intimacy which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I was able for so many years to have preserved it entire; and I think I shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion.”

You have to place this in what can be called the unseen Romantic collisions. There is a relation of Hazlitt to a character in a play of de Musset, Lorenzaccio, a person who is dark and who seems very disagreeable but at the same time is thinking about what is best for Venice.