Page 129 - DENG502_PROSE

Unit 14: Hazlitt-On Genius And Common Sense-Introduction

But they also lacked the benefit of Hazlitt’s extended reasoning and lucid imagery, and were Notes
never included among his greatest works. Recovery and second marriage
At the beginning of 1824, though worn out by thwarted passion and the venomous attacks on his

character following Liber Amoris, Hazlitt was beginning to recover his equilibrium. Pressed for
money as always, he continued to write for various periodicals, including The Edinburgh Review.
To The New Monthly Magazine he supplied more essays in the “Table-Talk” manner, and he produced
some art criticism, published in that year as Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries of England.
He also found relief, finally, from the Sarah Walker imbroglio. In 1823, Hazlitt had met Isabella
Bridgwater (née Shaw), who married him in March or April 1824, of necessity in Scotland, as
Hazlitt’s divorce was not recognised in England. Little is known about this Scottish-born widow
of a planter in the West Indies, or about her interaction with Hazlitt. She may have been attracted
to the idea of marrying a well-known author. For Hazlitt, she offered an escape from loneliness
and to an extent from financial worries, as she possessed an independent income. The arrangement
seems to have had a strong element of convenience for both of them. Certainly Hazlitt nowhere in
his writings suggests that this marriage was the love match he had been seeking, nor does he
mention his new wife at all.
In any case, the union afforded the two of them the opportunity to travel. First, they toured parts
of Scotland, then, later in 1824, began a European tour lasting over a year.

14.4 The Spirit of the Age

Before Hazlitt and his new bride set off for the continent, he submitted, among the miscellany of
essays that year, one to the New Monthly on “Jeremy Bentham”, the first in a series entitled “Spirits
of the Age”. Several more of the kind followed over the next few months, at least one in the
Examiner. Together with some newly written, and one brought in from the “Table-Talk” series,
they were collected in book form in 1825 as The Spirit of the Age: Or, Contemporary Portraits.
These sketches of twenty-five men, prominent or otherwise notable as characteristic of the age,
came easily to Hazlitt. In his days as a political reporter he had observed many of them at close

range. Others he knew personally, and for years their philosophy or poetry had been the subject
of his thoughts and lectures.
There were philosophers, social reformers, poets, politicians, and a few who did not fall neatly
into any of these categories. Bentham, Godwin, and Malthus, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron
were some of the most prominent writers; Wilberforce and Canning were prominent in the political
arena; and a few who were hard to classify, such as The Rev. Edward Irving, the preacher,
William Gifford, the satirist and critic, and the recently deceased Horne Tooke, a lawyer, politician,
grammarian, and wit.
Many of the sketches presented their subjects as seen in daily life. We witness, for example,
Bentham “tak[ing] a turn in his garden” with a guest, espousing his plans for “a code of laws ‘for
some island in the watery waste’”, or playing the organ as a relief from incessant musings on vast
schemes to improve the lot of mankind. As Bentham’s neighbour for some years, Hazlitt had had
good opportunity to observe the reformer and philosopher at first hand.
He had already devoted years to pondering much of the thinking espoused by several of these
figures. Thoroughly immersed in the Malthusian controversy, for example, Hazlitt had published
A Reply to the Essay on Population as early as 1807, and the essay on Malthus is a distillation of
Hazlitt’s earlier criticisms.
Where he finds it applicable, Hazlitt brings his subjects together in pairs, setting off one against
the other. So here he points out that, for all the limitations of Godwin’s reasoning, as given in that
essay, Malthus comes off worse: “Nothing...could be more illogical...than the whole of Mr. Malthus’s

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 123