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

his own experience of the fundamental human order, the man of genius looks for accordant Notes
expressions on the part of nature herself. But the man of common sense does this too, does he not?
How else could he regard her but in the light of his fundamental interpretive finesse or tact unless
it be with something less appropriate, like prejudice or vanity. The difference, then, is that the man
of genius creates new relationships with nature which common sense never realized before. “Genius
or originality is, for the most part, some strong quality in the mind, answering to and bringing out some
new and striking quality in nature [Hazlitt’s emphasis].’’ Apparently the “prophetic spirit” of common
sense in some persons of extreme capacity, which sets them over into a new category of intellect,
can enter or realize uncharted territories of internal or external nature and thus open them more
fully to experience. What genius discovers, once revealed, is available to all persons of common
sense. Those persons, however, do not merely passively receive what genius has given them.
Rather they themselves, having been shown the way, must positively reenact the discovery,
extending by imagination their own stores of passion or feeling into the revealed area of experience.
The creations of imagination, syntheses of various impressions, organize themselves for Hazlitt
around particular strong passions, not according to structured forms: “[In acts of association] any
impression in a series can recall any other impression in that series without going through the
whole in order: so that the mind drops the intermediate links, and passes on rapidly and by
stealth to the more striking effects of pleasure or pain which have naturally taken the strongest
hold of it.’’ The organizing nodes of mental syntheses, in Hazlitt’s view, are not rational, esthetic,
or logical arrangements and structures of impres sions, but rather strong predominating passions,
elemental in force, to which all other impressions are drawn, as to a magnet.
A key point to be observed in Hazlitt’s critical theory is that imagination belongs as well to the
person of common sense, the person of taste, and the person of genius. Imagination, based on
feeling, responsive to external and internal impressions according to the modes of a fundamen tal
human order of experience, is the power that communicates between them. And the fact that
imagination operates throughout the scale of cognition from the just-awakening common sense to
the loftiest genius means that a common instrument for expression or communication exists whereby
the discoveries of genius can be assimilated into the community at large; and, thus, the liberal
march of progress is effected. If the geniuses are the innovators and leaders of moral, cultural, or
artistic reform, persons of reliable common sense are needed to consolidate and establish the
reformation. Shelley recognized in Leigh Hunt such a person and invited him to Italy on that
basis.
This essay has devoted considerable space to reviewing fundamental critical principles expressed
by two romantic creators who were closest to Hunt during, probably, the most crucial year of his
life. One reason to conduct such a review, is that Hunt’s intelligence and critical reputation have
been attacked by influential scholars who have not considered the relevant context, but instead
have denigrated his work because it has not explicated Coleridge. In fact, the primary elements in
Hunt’s critical principles owe far more to Hazlitt and Shelley, whom he assimilated and represented
to the general reading public. A second reason for reviewing Shelley and Hazlitt, especially the
latter, is that they define a process, as it were a social program of art at its highest levels of
influence over the progressive tendencies of humankind, which explains precisely what Hunt’s
position and what his work amounted to in the romantic scheme of things. Hazlitt’s depiction of
genius and common sense provides the clearest model of what we may assume Hunt’s relation to
his greater contemporaries to be. It is a model which explains in more detail and gives significant
depth to the character Amy Lowell gave us of Hunt as “a great introducer.” Hunt had a power of
taste, in the high sense defined by Shelley and Hazlitt, that was effective in its own time and can
still instruct in its own right, and complete our awareness of that splendid age of literary art. Let
us consider an example.
Before turning to one of Hunt’s best pieces of practical criticism, let us address Hazlitt’s mild

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