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Unit 16: Hazlitt--On Genius and Common Sense...

prepares us for that ineffable and half-reluctant outburst on Coleridge”. Speaking of his now Notes
attitude towards his contemporaries, Hazlitt remarked: “I would speak of the living poets as I
have spoken of the dead; but I cannot speak of them with the same reverence because I do not feel
it”. His comments are frank and blunt, and they emerge from his honesty and sincerity.
Hazlitt’s literary criticism is at times a “prodigious variation” on the subject. He continues to say,
without being tired, what poetry is and what it is not in his Lectures on English Poets. At other
times he reveals a peculiar attitude exemplified in his treatment of specific texts and authors. This
attitude is best expressed in the words: “I somehow felt it as a point of honour not to make my
hearers think less highly of some of these old writers that I myself did of them. If I have praised
an author, it was because I liked him; if I have quoted a passage if was because it pleased me in the
reading; if I have spoken contemptuously of any one, it has been reluctantly”. At still other times
he was led by his prejudices and pre-conceived ideas, or by his own incompatible mental traits. He
was “often a creature of prejudice, of prejudice so irrational as to make him uncritical. His very
individuality, his originality, is sometimes a snare; he never enjoyed running in double harness,
and he sometimes kicks over the traces from sheet wilfulness.

Hazlitt’s literary theory is clearly expressed in three essays. These are “On Poetry
in General”, “On Gusto”, and “Why the Arts are not Progressive”.

In these essays we find that poetry is “the language of the imagination and the passions”. In his
approach to poetry he sought to understand “the internal character, the living principle” and to
arrive at an acceptable standard for the “improvement of taste”, The ideas expressed in these
essays are not vague, in spite of Mr. Watson’s Cavalier attitude of Hazlitt; for Mr. Watson fails to
see Hazlitt’s theory in the context of the Romantic theory of poetry. Since Mr. Watson bandies
about vague terms like “analysis” and “descriptions”, he finds vagueness whereever the critic
avoided it. Hazlitt was a highly sensitive student of literature, and therefore succeeds in articulating
what we feel in the presence of great literature. Accordingly he observers that “poetry is literature
and with a rare common sense which always attended his ecstasies, he read and wrote with a
gusto. There is always a “continuity of impression” in all that he wrote. This is a criticism which
is always fresh and original. It is not therefore surprising to find that he was the first to discover
many important authors. Even when Johnson was half-hearted in his attitude to the novelists,
Hazlitt wrote on them with admirable tact and taste. Candidly does he express even here his like
and dislikes. This is an intimately personal kind of criticism which is not burdened by an abstract
literary theory. He was eager to recreate for himself and for his readers the experience out of
which a given work of art may have sprung. He did to take kindly to the oblique poetry of Danne;
but he was sympathetic to the metaphysical poets. In emphasizing Milton’s “Force of Imagination”,
he drew attention to the nature and value of the epic as a literary genre. He refers to those
“superior, happy spirits who slid through life on the rollers of learning”. He presented Dryden
and People, who were disliked by many Romantic poets and critics, as poets who should be
popular because they are poet of art who “polished life”. In such critical appraisals we notice his
“extraordinary fertility and felicity in judgement, of individual authors, books, or pieces”

16.1 Basic Principle of Hazlitt Essays

The basic principle he followed as a literary critic was expressed by him thus: “I have undertaken
merely to read over a set of authors with the audience, as I would do with a friend, to point out a
favourite passage, to explain an objection; or of a remark or a theory as it occurs to state it in
illustration of the subject: but neither tire him nor puzzle myself with pedantic rules and pragmatical

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