Dear Unknown Friends:
We publish here the conclusion of the 1970 lecture by Eli Siegel that we’ve been serializing: Hazlitt Tells of Criticism. And lest anyone, seeing the title, should think this talk is about literary criticism in some remote-from-life way—I assure you that it is as much of you as your own hopes are. It’s alive with needed knowledge for everyone.
Essayist and critic William Hazlitt lived from 1778 to 1830, and Mr. Siegel makes that writer’s seeing and feeling come close to us. He shows Hazlitt’s tumult (which had a grandeur to it), and he shows the big matter that was driving Hazlitt. These become almost tangible for us, so living are they.
The criticism Mr. Siegel speaks of is, certainly, literary criticism—but is not that alone, because criticism goes on in us every moment of our lives. We have, all the time and usually without being aware of it, the question of how to value things: how good or not good are they. I’ve quoted Mr. Siegel’s informal description: a true critic is one who “makes a good thing look good, a bad thing look bad, and a middling thing look middling.”
In my commentaries on this lecture (and, of course, elsewhere), I’ve written about the greatness of Eli Siegel himself as critic: the expanse and depth of his knowledge; his justice, vivid and rich; the style, itself so beautiful, of his written or spoken prose; his wonderful humor; the exactness—flexible and firm and warm—with which he saw anything. The phrase Harriet Martineau used in 1849 about Hazlitt is true of Eli Siegel: he was “the prince of critics.”
This Is Necessary
In the final section of the lecture, Mr. Siegel is discussing passages from Alexander Ireland’s 1889 work William Hazlitt, Essayist and Critic. And early in this discussion there’s a sentence by Mr. Siegel that I care for very much. He is commenting on something that must be present in true criticism: “If you want to be a critic,” he says, “you have to be as keen as anything and, at the same time, you have to have the intensity of a happy animal.” True criticism is not some pseudo-intellectual, adroit and dreary exercise: if we don’t feel in a large and just way as we want to know precisely, if we want to wow with our cleverness and don’t want to be deeply stirred, if erudition is not together with glad emotion—we are not authentic critics. We’re also untrue to ourselves. This fact is explained by the principle at the basis of Aesthetic Realism, a principle that was come to by Eli Siegel and that itself is great in the history of criticism and human understanding: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
This is an urgent matter, not only for literary and art criticism but for life itself. Unless we see being keenly just as the same as having relish, real delight, we won’t fully like justice. That means: at a certain time we’ll want to please ourselves with something that’s other-than-just, other-than-beautiful, other-than-accurate.
Four Maxims about Criticism
To accompany the final section of Hazlitt Tells of Criticism, I’m going to include four maxims by Eli Siegel from his book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. I’ve chosen these because they’re all, in various ways, about criticism. —A maxim is a statement that comments succinctly on an aspect of life, and should do so with a combination of subtlety and snap.
1) Here is the first I’ve chosen on our subject of criticism:
When your conscience accuses you, take down the main points.
The existence of a conscience is evidence that we are made in such a way as to be critics of ourselves. This is a great and beautiful fact. Meanwhile, human beings, affected by their own ethical pangs and accusations, have mainly not tried to look at those accusations clearly. People have endured self-dislike but have most often not asked, What, really, am I trying to tell myself—just what do I object to in myself? In fact, people have often used their pangs of conscience to feel sorry for themselves, to preen themselves on their sensitivity, and to see the world as mean for having such a nice person as oneself suffer this way. So the maxim says, Try to be exact about your self-criticism: “take down the main points.”
The maxim is beautiful as prose. In the first part of it there is a music of trouble, twist, self-turmoil, with the sounds of conscience accuses. Then the second part comes, insistent, kindly firm, with its five monosyllables: “take down the main points.”
2) The second maxim I’ll quote from Damned Welcome is only four words. It’s about reality itself as a critic:
The wonderful dogs us.
For something to dog us is for it to keep after us, no matter how much we try to elude it. Does reality have this critical message for everyone: There’s much more that’s wonderful in the world than you, in your conceit, want to see; and I’ll keep after you in some fashion until you welcome that wonder?
There’s humor of course in this short maxim, but there’s poetry too. The three-syllable expansive word wonderful, as it reaches and flutters through space, is so different from that solid, insistent, earthy monosyllable dogs. And yet—there is that d sound the two words have in common. And the os in both words, along with the uh in us, have a certain likeness too.
3) The third maxim is about the fact that children have been critics of their parents: they’ve seen things they like, things they don’t like, and things they don’t understand. Without knowing it, children long to be good critics, to see and value rightly, to want to know. At the same time, the thing that Aesthetic Realism shows is the big interference with one’s being a true critic is in people of every age: contempt, the “disposition…to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”
The child in this maxim is not having contempt. But he is puzzled: how should he see his mother now—is she critical of something? and what? Here is the maxim, beautiful in the way it’s both definite and gentle. Its second half musically has us feel this child’s puzzlement is in all time and space.
His mother seemed annoyed to the little Assyrian child, and he never found out whether she was or not.
4) We come to the final maxim I’ll quote. It’s about criticism itself, and it is immensely relevant to both William Hazlitt and Eli Siegel:
When we honor rightly, we should be honored.
—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education
A Loving Fight with the Universe
By Eli Siegel
Alexander Ireland quotes a description of Hazlitt by the writer Bryan Waller Proctor. Proctor used the pen name Barry Cornwall, and his prose is more important than his verse. He gave his thoughts about Hazlitt to Ireland, who includes the following:
He [Hazlitt] was a simple, unselfish man, void of all deception and pretence; and he had a clear, acute intellect, when not traversed by some temporary passion or confused by a strong prejudice.
That phrase “He was a simple, unselfish man”—there is nothing more avant-garde. To be simple in the deepest sense (to be an integrity) and unselfish is to be the most subtle thing our age can show—or any age. That Proctor uses this phraseology makes me respect him more. —And he says this about Hazlitt’s life:
It seems to be a hopeless task to be always toiling up an ascent, where power and malignity united stand armed at the top.
That description was quite true.
Also quoted by Ireland is Harriet Martineau (1802-76). She is one of the keenest women who ever wrote. Whatever else, she showed people that the feminine mind can be historical and keen and aware of political economy. She wrote a History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace (that is, from 1816 to 1846), and Hazlitt is included in that history. She says there are new paintings around, and new things in literature, and not having Hazlitt to tell us what he thinks of them is a great loss. It’s very affecting:
In Hazlitt we lost the prince of critics; and after he was gone, there were many who could never look at a picture, or see a tragedy, or ponder a point of morals, or take a survey of any public character, without a melancholy sense of loss in Hazlitt’s absence and silence. There can scarcely be a stronger gratification of the critical faculties than in reading Hazlitt’s essays. He was not an amiable and happy, but he was a strong and courageous-minded man….He was regarded with respect for his ingenuous courage in saying what was true about many important things and persons of his time, of whom it was fitting that the truth should be told.
What Has to Be
Then Ireland quotes Richard Garnett, who had written on Hazlitt for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ireland quotes this sentence of his about Hazlitt:
He was a compound of intellect and passion, and the refinement of his critical analysis is associated with vehement eloquence and glowing imagery.
That combination is what has to be felt. If you want to be a critic you have to be as keen as anything and, at the same time, you have to have the intensity of a happy animal. You have to have the intensity of organic spirits made divine.
The last person Ireland quotes in his introductory memoir is George Saintsbury, and he quotes many sentences. Ireland says:
The most recent opinion delivered on Hazlitt is from the pen of Mr. George Saintsbury….It is characterized by that critical acumen and sound judgment which distinguish most of Mr. Saintsbury’s literary estimates. It will be found in Macmillan’s Magazine for 1887.
But Ireland doesn’t say what I think is true, and mentioned earlier: if it hadn’t been for the essay of Saintsbury, there would not have been this 1889 publication of Hazlitt’s work edited by Ireland, with the memoir by Ireland from which I’ve been quoting.
Among the statements of Saintsbury that Ireland includes is this one, which I read before—Saintsbury says of Hazlitt:
He was, in literature, a great man. I am myself disposed to think that, for all his access of hopelessly uncritical prejudice, he was the greatest critic that England has yet produced.
He Dealt with So Much
After the memoir, Ireland gives some of the miscellaneous quality of Hazlitt as a writer.
In his Lectures on the English Comic Writers Hazlitt deals with the dramas of Congreve and Wycherley, but he also deals with what was a big thing in the 18th century, the periodical essay: that is, writings in the Spectator, the Tatler, Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World, the Connoisseur, the Lounger.
He deals with Richard Steele’s writing in the Tatler that told about various people of London. There’s this sentence about life—it’s sad, but it has the Hazlitt liveliness and structure:
The departures and arrivals of widows with handsome jointures, either to bury their grief in the country, or to procure a second husband in town, are punctually recorded in his pages.
One large matter about Hazlitt is the way he saw the past. He saw the past as more alive than the future, and that is shown in many places. The way he saw the past was unlike that of any other writer. He says:
The privilege of thus virtually transporting ourselves to past times, is even greater than that of visiting distant places in reality. London, a hundred years ago, would be much better worth seeing than Paris at the present moment.
A Great Expression of Gratitude
An essay of Hazlitt included by Ireland is “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” and one of the greatest acknowledgments by one person to another person is in that essay. At the time Hazlitt wrote this, in 1823, he had been hurt by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and had many doubts about him. But, writing about his knowing Coleridge in 1798, he says this:
My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge.
Hazlitt tells how he visited Nether Stowey, to see Coleridge and Wordsworth. And he has vistas. He has summations. Macaulay is good at summations of many things seen swiftly and with composition, and Hazlitt also has the vista way, the panorama way. There is this passage:
I arrived, and was well received. The country about Nether Stowey is beautiful, green and hilly, and near the sea-shore. I saw it but the other day, after an interval of twenty years, from a hill near Taunton. How was the map of my life spread out before me, as the map of the country lay at my feet!
This desire to change place into time is in Hazlitt.
Painting and Acting
A famous essay of Hazlitt, so different from the literary essays in a way, is “On the Pleasure of Painting.” Hazlitt himself was a painter. The essay that is most valuable in giving one an idea of painting as work is this essay. He points to two things in all art: one, spontaneity, grace, swiftness, intuition; and the other, great care and labor accompanied by love for what you’re laboring at. He says:
In spite of the facility, the fluttering grace, the evanescent hues, that play round the pencil of Rubens and Vandyke, however I may admire, I do not envy them this power so much as I do the slow, patient, laborious execution of Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Andrea del Sarto, where every touch appears conscious of its charge, emulous of truth, and where the painful artist has so distinctly wrought, “That you might almost say his picture thought.”
That line is from Donne, changed by Hazlitt.
There’s an essay titled “On Actors and Acting.” Hazlitt is aware that in his time one could no longer see Garrick, who died in 1779. But he says this:
One thunder of applause from pit, boxes, and gallery, is equal to a whole immortality of posthumous fame: and when we hear an actor, whose modesty is equal to his merit, declare that he would like to see a dog wag his tail in approbation, what must he feel when he sets the whole house in a roar!
That is lively!
For reasons which perhaps I can talk about at another time, Hazlitt was much affected by the prose of Edmund Burke. (Here, Hazlitt, Woodrow Wilson, and Walter Bagehot are together.) He says of Burke’s prose:
The most rigid fidelity and the most fanciful extravagance meet and are reconciled in his pages.
That’s from the essay “On the Prose-Style of Poets.”
In the essay “Whether Genius Is Conscious of Its Powers,” we see some of the feeling Hazlitt had for Napoleon. That feeling is like Heine’s: it’s of love. It’s hard to understand, but no person was ever more loved than Napoleon was by Hazlitt. Stories are told of how Hazlitt looked after hearing about Waterloo. I hope to say more about this too: why, with all the talk of despotism which was going on then, as it did later, Hazlitt felt that Napoleon represented the heart of man. He says:
Therefore I lamented, and would take no comfort when the Mighty fell [that is, Napoleon], because we, all men, fell with him, like lightning from heaven, to grovel in the grave of Liberty, in the style of Legitimacy!
This Is in Hazlitt
Hazlitt was aware of himself as having a loving fight with the universe. The intensity of Hazlitt’s interest in beauty as truth, and truth as beauty, the successful showing of that interest in many places, is to be seen—although Hazlitt was very often not at his best. Yet there was this like for what the world could be—as leaves, as food, as cloud, and also the world as seen through the drama, through acting, through painting, poems, novels, essays. This is in Hazlitt: a desire to like the world in terms of how it was made.
He did feel that unless he presented the seeing of what is true and beautiful precisely, he would be unfair, he would be sloppy. And that was the last thing he wanted to be—even though at times he didn’t fulfill his own desire. That is why Hazlitt Tells of Criticism. And I hope to show he has more to tell.