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Prose

Notes 18.5 Summary

• One of the triumvirate of eminent romantic essayists – Lamb, De Quincy and Hazlitt –
Hazlitt is the least mannered or rather eccentric. While in Lamb’s and De Quincy emotion
and imagination relegated the fast and the analytical to the insignificant, Hazlitt’s is a futile
blend of emotion and thought, passion and logic imagination and analysis, the real and the
romantic. However, he is famous for the lucidity and brilliance, in both style and content, of
his many essays. Fully endowed with the ability of soaring in an imaginative flight, as in his
essays On the Picturesque and Ideal and On a Sundial, his dominating bias was however
for a union of romantic temperament and classical vigour. The resulting essays, including
Common Sense on Fashion, On the want of Money and On Nicknames have the fine-
wrought grace of the golden mean. His prose displays the same discrimination between the
vulgar and the otiose, for he had a Wordsworthian faith in the simple and the sincere.
• The Round Table, Table Talk and The Plain Speaker cover a variety of subjects ranging
from art and philosophy to politics and prizefighting. These works helped to establish Hazlitt’s
reputation as the most versatile critic of his day. The Spirit of the Age, a work that is
regarded as his critical masterpiece, contains valuable biographical sketches of these writers
and of other contemporary intellectual leaders. William Hazlitt was not only acquainted
with that point of view as it appeared in books, but had the advantage of knowing the
authors personally, and hearing their informal discussions of of individual writers.Farther,
Hazlitt lectured extensively on English drama: Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, Lectures
on the English Poets, Views of the English Stage, Essays on the English Comic Writers,
and Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. With these works Hazlitt established
himself as one of the foremost literary critics of the romantic period and as a master of the
informal essay.
• The romantics are renowned for expatiating at length upon the relatively trivial, and Hazlitt
is no exception. Hazlitt has the romanticism to turn the humble topic of nicknames into an
elaborate and animated discussion. A Juliet may contend that ‘a rose called by any other
name would smell as sweet’, but Hazlitt describes how nicknames alter our perception of a
person. To use the analogy of reflection used by Addison, the same person appears distorted
when seen through the medium of nicknames.
• Whether in his literary essays on in his essays about everyday life, Hazlitt amazes the reader
with his logical rigour. He points out that the basis of nicknames is a perception of difference
or distinction: ‘The only meaning of those vulgar nicknames… is that others differ from you
in some respect or other’ (whether it be opinion, dress, clime or complexion).
• Ironically, those who give nicknames often forget that those who have been given such
opprobrious names have the same right to confer equally repulsive nicknames on the same
principle of difference. Further, nicknames, as he points out with admirable logic, are effective
only because they do not require any material proof, any causal evidence. Finally nicknames
are much more effective than direct charges simply because while direct charges can be
refuted, ‘a nickname baffles reply by the very vagueness of the influences from it’. Hazlitt also
answers the question as to whom or what kind of men uses nicknames. He feels that it is the
hidden enemies, the cowards and the hypocrites who use nicknames.
• Hazlitt is the erudite among the romantic essayists, like Coleridge among the romantic poets.
He uses ordinary proverbs – ‘Give a dog an ill name and hang him’ – as well as learned or
foreign phrases, such as causa causal causa causatic. But his greatest virtuosity lies in his
idolizations of literary quotations from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline, Julius
Caesar, as well as numerous others from Southey, Foxe, Male, Voltare & so on.

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