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

Hazlitt justifies his own contrary attitude at length: “When one is found fault with for nothing, or Notes
for doing one’s best, one is apt to give the world their revenge. All the former part of my life I was
treated as a cipher; and since I have got into notice, I have been set upon as a wild beast. When this
is the case, and you can expect as little justice as candour, you naturally in self-defence take refuge
in a sort of misanthropy and cynical contempt for mankind.” And yet on reflection, Hazlitt felt
that his life was not so bad after all:
The man of business and fortune ... is up and in the city by eight, swallows his breakfast in haste,
attends a meeting of creditors, must read Lloyd’s lists, consult the price of consols, study the
markets, look into his accounts, pay his workmen, and superintend his clerks: he has hardly a
minute in the day to himself, and perhaps in the four-and-twenty hours does not do a single thing
that he would do if he could help it. Surely, this sacrifice of time and inclination requires some
compensation, which it meets with. But how am I entitled to make my fortune (which cannot be
done without all this anxiety and drudgery) who do hardly any thing at all, and never any thing
but what I like to do? I rise when I please, breakfast at length, write what comes into my head, and
after taking a mutton-chop and a dish of strong tea, go to the play, and thus my time passes.
He was perhaps overly self-disparaging in this self-portrait, but it opens a window on the kind of
life Hazlitt was leading at this time, and how he evaluated it in contrast to the lives of his more
overtly successful contemporaries.
Hero worship
In August 1826, Hazlitt and his wife set out for Paris again, so he could research what he hoped
would be his masterpiece, a biography of Napoleon, seeking “to counteract the prejudiced
interpretations of Scott’s biography”.Hazlitt “had long been convinced that Napoleon was the
greatest man of his era, the apostle of freedom, a born leader of men in the old heroic mould: he
had thrilled to his triumphs over ‘legitimacy’ and suffered real anguish at his downfall”.
This did not work out quite as planned. His wife’s independent income allowed them to take
lodgings in a fashionable part of Paris; he was comfortable, but also distracted by visitors and far
from the libraries he needed to visit. Nor did he have access to all the materials that Scott’s stature
and connections provided him with for his own life of Napoleon. Hazlitt’s son also spent time
with them, and there were conflicts between him and his father which also drove a wedge between
Hazlitt and his second wife, and that marriage was now deteriorating rapidly.
None of his books were selling at all well, and thus time also had to be spent churning out more
articles to pay expenses. Despite all the distractions, a few essays written at this time proved to be
among his finest, such as “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth”, published in The Monthly
Magazine (not to be confused with the similarly named New Monthly Magazine) in March 1827. The
essay “On a Sun-Dial”, which appeared late in 1827, may have been written on an interpolated
second tour to Italy with his wife and son.
Finally, after Hazlitt returned to London with his son in August 1827, he was shocked to discover
that his wife, still in Paris, was leaving him. He settled in modest lodgings on Half-Moon Street in
London, and from then on fought a continual battle against poverty, regularly forced to grind out
a stream of articles, mostly undistinguished, just to pay expenses. Relatively little is known of
Hazlitt’s other activities in this period. He spent as much time, apparently, at Winterslow as he
did in London. Some meditative essays emerged from this stay in his favourite country retreat,

and he also made progress with his life of Napoleon. But he also found himself struggling against
bouts of illness, nearly dying at Winterslow in December 1827.Two volumes—the first half—of the
Napoleon biography appeared in 1828, only to have the publisher fail soon thereafter. This meant
even more financial difficulties for the author, and what little evidence we have of his activities at
the time, apart from a stream of hastily written articles turned out to pay the bills, consists in large
part of begging letters to publishers for advances of money.

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