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

These few passages, I believe, illustrate how vividly Hunt’s essay picks up and redeploys the Notes
concepts of his great precursors. One or two further comments must suffice for this demonstration.
Hunt’s discussion of imagination and fancy has been much discussed by Wellek, Fogle, Thompson,
and others, who do or do not believe he knew what he was talking about. Those who think he did
not know insist that he was trying to explain Coleridge but could not. I would simply agree with
James R. Thompson that in the distinction he makes between the two terms, “It is more likely...
that Hunt’s reference is to the preface of Wordsworth’s 1815 edition in which he attempts to justify
his classifications’’ than it is to Biographia Literaria, To me, Hunt’s discussion of imagination and
fancy is sufficiently compatible with Wordsworth’s to demonstrate a reasoned and intelligent
position on his part rather than the dim-witted pretense at understanding implied by Wellek.
One further example: Fogle is remarkably disturbed by Hunt’s mention of love and beauty in the
final clause of his outline. Fogle writes, “To make Poetry the child of Love and Beauty... is to create
a family group that defies analysis .... One would like to ask what the exact qualities of Love and
Beauty are that are reproduced in their child Poetry.’’ The answer to Fogle is rather simple. Hunt
has claimed that poetry “is the greatest proof to man of the pleasure to be found in all things, and
of the probable riches of infinitude.” This is easy enough to interpret in the light of poetry’s
relation to the fundamental order of experience between man and nature. Maybe the phrase
“probable riches of in finitude” refers to transcendent implications, like Wordsworth’s “Intimations
of Immortality”; but that need not concern us for the present. Hunt also says, however, that two
qualities, love and beauty, are even greater proofs of these felicities than poetry is, and furthermore,
it is apparently these greater qualities that by their conjunction give birth to poetry. This is the
assertion that has confused.
The discussion so far concerning the meaning of “Beauty” for Hunt and Shelley explains how she
might be called the giver of felicity and the mother of poetry. But how does “Love” enter the
picture? Realizing that we are reading the last clause of Hunt’s topical outline for his essay, if we
turn to the last topic developed, we find another quotation from Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry,”
wherein the bridegroom appeareth. The first part of the quoted passage alludes again to the
progressive recovery of the beauty of existence through poetic expressions which use external
nature to reveal the exalted humanity of our interior spirit: poetry represents or “impersonates”
objects, which then stand as “memorials of that gentle and exalted content” — human feeling and
human being — “which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it co-exists.” It is
also notable that this part of Shelley’s paragraph describes the activity of the poet himself, the
maker of the book proper which Hunt distinguished in the opening phrases of his essay. Reading
on into the second half of the quoted passage, we see that “Love” is the new concept introduced.
Additionally, it becomes apparent by the last sentence of the passage that the perspective has
shifted away from the poet who makes the book to the reader of the book, the receiver of the
effects of poetry, which are explicitly stated in this instance to be moral in character. In commenting
on his choice of this passage, Hunt calls it a “peroration.” As a good Latinist Hunt would know
that the basic meaning of the word is not simply a fancy passage of prose, but the concluding
rhetorical summation of the primary point of a discourse. But in fact the passage is not, in Shelley’s
“Defence,” the peroration. It comes from the early middle of the essay and is merely one among
a number of parallel ideas. But the passage is Hunt’s peroration. By his selection and placement of
Shelley’s paragraph, he makes it the rhetorical conclusion of his own essay. He assimilates his
thought to it and ties conclusively together the various threads of his critical exposition.
The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of
ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be
greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of
another, and of many others: the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The
great instrument of moral good is imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon
the cause.
Though Shelley’s expression of his critical genius is compact and intense, it can be explicated

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