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

Hazlitt rejects it in spite of his great love for Johnson’s writings. Notes
The familiar style involves hard task. One has to use common words without appearing to be low
or vulgar. This is because this style is neither quaint nor vulgar which employs living and vigorous
words and phrases that are in universal use. Such expressions include “cut with a knife” and “cut
a piece of wood”, not “cut an acquintance”. The last one is rejected as it belongs to slang: and it
may be accepted if it becomes as part of normal usage. In outlining this principle,Hazlitt of glory,
shining inscriptions, the figures of a transparency”. The images employed by such writers have
little to do with their feelings; and then the images become adventitious. The ignorance of the
writer is also revealed by the absence of any relation between the word and the thing, between the
object and the feeling, and between the image ad its context. The writer of such a passage is “the
plagiarist of words”, a writer revelling in obscurity and in far-fetched words.
Hazlitt’s emphasis was therefore on a style that is not far different from the language of conversation.
This style is informal and yet literary; and it demands a clarity in working, a mastery of vocabulary,
an alert mind, and a sensitive approach to words and things. The writer must love his words.

16.4 Hazlitt’s Style

Stevenson, himself a great stylist, observed: “We may all be mighty fine fellows, but none of us
can write like William Hazlitt”. It is a style which is vigorous and English and which has no
idiosyncrasy. As Hazlitt remarked, “I hate my style to be known, as I hate all idiosyncrasy”. The
style of Hazlitt is one of the glorious worthies of English literature.
Hazlitt’s style was moulded by the influences he received from the Elizabethan writers, the poets
and dramatists of the Restoration, the prose writers of the eighteenth century, and his contempoaries
like Wordsworth and Coleridge. These influences and his native gifts gave him a “lively and
substantial” style which is “buoyant without being forthy, glittering with no tinsel frippery”. This
style is easy, incisive, homely, picturesque, and vigorous, since he emulated Burke who “Poured
out his mind on paper”. Rejecting the pedantic devices like antithesis and parallelism, he arrived
at a forked, playful, and trimmed style. Trusting like a musician the immediate impact of the
sounds of words, he came to develop a style that is nearer the spoken tongue It can be read aloud
with great effect.
In this style the dominant factor is the intellect. Since the cultivation of a good style is not an
instance of the mechanical skill, it is not possible to achieve perfection here.

16.5 Critical Appreciation

A wonderfully apt, succinct characterization of Leigh Hunt appears in a recent popular literary
history: “Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was a gifted and industrious man of letters, who spent much of
his working life in the company of men of genius.’’ A better brief estimation would be hard to
find, but it points to a special problem. How does one write about an author whose work was
done more than a century ago if that writer was not himself a genius? How do you talk about a
man of considerable talent who, it is asserted, never wrote anything absolutely of the first rank but
whose work you nevertheless wish to commend? In reading the scholarly critical literature on
Hunt, again and again one finds condemning, or at best apologetic, assessments. “[Hunt’s criticism]
lacks theoretical power, as his loose derivative theory of the imagination shows. He has little
judgment However important as a middleman of romantic ideas and tastes he lacks real distinction
of mind.’’ “Hunt [employing the critical vocabulary of romanticism] is using these terms for the
emotional aura that surrounds them, and all precision of meaning is lost.’’“We should acknowledge
at the outset... that Hunt’s intellectual faculties for synthesis were not of the first order and that he
was not especially interested in theoretical matters.’’ One has to sympathize with the scholars who

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