Hazlitt
Excellent. Hazlitt again. Say what you will about the Guardian – they do have a good books section, and they do keep having articles on Hazlitt. More than you can say for the New York Times!
I’ve said it before so why not say it again (especially since the article is saying much the same thing). Hazlitt is the most inexplicable case of undeserved literary obscurity that I know of in the case of an Anglophone author. Absolutely the top one. To be sure, there are Elizabethans and 17th century people who are well worth reading, who don’t get read all that much any more – Sidney, Nashe, Browne, Burton. But the barriers to reading them are easily understandable. But Hazlitt? Hazlitt?? Hazlitt is so readable it’s absurd, and the genre he writes in, unlike the genres that Nashe, Browne and Burton wrote in, is still very much current. He wrote essays and reviews. Big leap, huh? Nobody reads essays and reviews any more!
So why is Hazlitt so damn gone? Why was I made to read Lamb essays in school while I never so much as heard of Hazlitt? Why, why, why? I have no idea. I mean I really don’t – I don’t have a lurking suspicion of something or other; I have no clue; it makes no sense.
Because here’s the thing. He’s a brilliant stylist. Brilliant. Not just pretty good, not just very good; brilliant. One of the very, very best. He makes Orwell look lame. And nobody reads him. It’s tragic! And in case being a brilliant stylist is not enough, he’s no slouch as a thinker. And he’s politically interesting, and he’s good on literature, and he has an interesting mind and personality and take on things. There’s just no downside to reading Hazlitt. But no one does.
A reasonably well-educated friend noticed this book peeping out of my pocket one morning and remarked that it was rather heavy reading for such a time of day, or indeed for any time. I do wish people would stop doing this. Because Hazlitt died 170-odd years ago and is not as famous as Wordsworth or Coleridge, they assume that he cannot be an easy read, or even less of an easy read than W&C, or that to read him is more of a duty than a pleasure.
If you want a depressing lesson in contemporary cultural memory, go to any average-sized branch of a chain bookstore and ask for anything by Hazlitt. You will notice that it will take the person at the counter four or five goes to get the spelling right…
Terrible. Hazlitt rules. Down with archbishops and up with Hazlitt. Happy Easter.
I read Hazlitt.
Maybe he’s too politically extreme (ardent Bonapartist) and too emotionally unbalanced (Liber Amoris) for the secondary school curriculum. Maybe he’s too old-hat for colleges and universities. Nothing particularly postmodern or postcolonialist or sexually ambiguous about him. Just some old dead white dude with some outdated politics and way too much testosterone. Now maybe if he’d been a multiracial cross-dressing masochistic incestuous bisexual who wrote obsessively, but always in code, about the joys and sorrows stemming from his rigid toilet training by a Jamaican nanny, then we’d have something worth putting on the syllabus.
Do you! Tovarich!
I don’t know, though. The political reason doesn’t work all that well – all the Romantics were rads, though W & C went to the bad later, which is one reason Hazlitt was critical of them. Same with emotional thing – applies to Coleridge, Byron (incest! boys! manymany women! bastards!). And the same with the fashionable thing. He dropped out of sight long, long before the fashionable crowd came along – and he offers plenty of material of the kind they like. No, I don’t think any of that really explains it. I don’t know what does…Unless it’s just that he wrote only essays and reviews…? But then so did Montaigne (except the reviews part) and that didn’t plunge him into obscurity. And there’s Lamb, too – why did we read him and not the H man? Nope – I remain puzzled.
When did you read Lamb? He’s age-appropriate for elementary school kids (as the H man isn’t), which is probably why he was assigned. Really, very few writers (a handful of novelists and poets, mainly) more than a century old are read nowadays unless they’re on a syllabus. Don’t buy my political fashion analysis? Well, then I’m stumped, too. Keep preaching the word, Ophelia, and maybe you’ll eventually resurrect Mr. H’s literary reputation.
BTW, I seem to recall that Edmund Wilson (of all people!) didn’t much like Hazlitt’s stuff. Odd, because if any American writer of the 20th century resembled Hazlitt, it was Wilson.
Are you mourning the moment of radical liberal defeat? Has Hazlitt been forgotten? Well, only if people are remembering to forget, rather than forgetting to remember.
No, John, we are mourning the moment of modern moral consciousness, ushered in by none other than you yourself. Would that we could forget!
Karl:
Is there such a thing as moral progress? Obviously not, since morality is always ab ovo and nothing can relieve the burden of moral initiation. What does change is the structure of moral consciousness. One of the structural changes of the “progress” of modern moral consciousness, which you are striving so mightily to forget, is, paradoxically enough, the growth of the amoral component of morality. Part of that is entirely non-moral, since modern society increasingly disemburdens the social regulatory function of morality onto instrumentalized steering media, such as money or bureaucracy/legality. (You might consult the comsumately cynical systems-theoretic sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who maps the emergence of modern moral ideas onto the transition from hierarchical to lateral-functional modes of social integration.) But the other part of that amounts to a growth of moral insight, whereby moral relations become less narrow and fraught, which equally allows for the broadening of the scope of moral concerns and of the understanding of the components of moral life. This is often expressed in terms of the shiboleth of “tolerance”, which raises the dreaded spectre of relativism. But tolerance is only a virtue because other people are so infernally irritating. No, I just don’t make this shit up.
Anybody here read David Lodge, or is he too (deliberately) entertaining?
There is some point to the question – Professor Phillip Swallow and Hazlitt, fashions in writers, different takes on unfashionable writers by different cultures.
Yup. I know – I was thinking of mentioning the bit in Small World where a colleague says of Swallow that it’s typical of him to be doing a book on Hazlitt – typical of Swallow’s out-of-it cluelessness.
As opposed to the right-on Morris Zapp… it’s all there.
Yup. Especially funny since Morris Zapp is a version of Stanley Fish.
Oh, John, you are absolutely adorable! I don’t have a clue what you’re saying, but you’re just so damn cute when you talk like that. I could listen to you go on forever. Let’s move to Canada and get married.